Some Context on Cisco's Bad China Week

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May 22, 2008

Some Context on Cisco's Bad China Week

As usual, when something to do with China is making the rounds, Rebecca MacKinnon has useful details and provides more context. This time around, it’s related to an internal Cisco document from 2002, recently published by Wired, that indicates the company was pleased to take advantage of the “opportunities” presented by, among other things, China’s crackdown on Falun Gong:

“To many reporters who cover China, this debate is reminiscent of the debate in the 90s about dual-use export controls on computers that could be used either to save lives in hospitals or to launch ICBM’s… eventually the free-traders won out (with heavy lobbying by the American Chamber of Commerce) because they argued that if IBM didn’t sell the computers, then the Japanese or Germans or somebody else would anyway, China’s behavior or capabilities would be no different but Americans would have lost the business.

“I find the Cisco case much tougher to argue than the Yahoo case or even Google or Microsoft: At least in those cases the facts of what employees of these companies did and didn’t do, under what circumstances, and with what direct consequences for whom, were either clear from the beginning or could be sleuthed out. With Cisco, cold hard proof of exactly what Cisco employees did or didn’t do - and what their intentions were - remains elusive. We know that their routers have been used for censorship. Nobody has yet come up with ‘smoking gun’ evidence to back up Gutmann’s account that Cisco was selling a special censorship router. Cisco has done a great job at preventing anybody from obtaining any evidence that can’t be denied or discounted in some way. This new powerpoint adds a strong data point that makes Cisco’s intentions look really bad. It takes us closer but it doesn’t take us all the way there.

“Whatever the truth is, Cisco has not been transparent and forthcoming with the public about their activities in China. And they’ve failed to engage in the ongoing effort to set human rights standards for Internet and telecoms companies - as Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo among others have done.”

Sometimes I get the sense that the business community’s overwhelming belief regarding China is that some day it will be a liberal democracy on a par with anything you might find in Western Europe, and that we’ll all have a laugh about how silly old China just took a little longer than the rest of us to straighten up and act like some sort of Amsterdam on the Yangtze. That assumption in hand, everyone feels free to make sure they’re doing as much business as possible with the current government, which is most pointedly not a liberal democracy.

Banking on forgetfulness is probably not a losing strategy for a business. In some ways, the pressure companies doing business in China face in terms of PR and bad sleep is similar to that of companies operating in South Africa in the ’80s during the height of the disinvestment movement. In fact, Google’s last shareholder meeting involved a (losing) proposal presented by Amnesty International on behalf of a pension fund, which will sound very familiar if you were around just about any American campus in the ’80s. The net result? Twenty years later there are plenty of “socially responsible” investment funds, many of which grew out of disinvestment sentiment, but I don’t know anyone who’s still boycotting companies that tried to tough out the pressure.

(Link)