Just how low will Silicon Valley’s internet chieftans bow in order to get access to the China market? Twitter’s appointment of Kathy Chen as Twitter’s managing director for Greater China would seem to suggest that the answer is: pretty low.
Ms Chen was an engineer in the Chinese military in the 1980s. In itself that’s not so unusual. Plenty of Chinese graduates have been through the military, especially the older generation. But Ms Chen’s admission in a 2004 interview that she once helped develop software for a firm in which China’s ministry of public security held a stake and which would filter “information of political sensitivity” is obviously more worrying.
Twitter says the idea Chen is a Beijing-friendly placewoman is over-blown – and that she was only involved in eradicating viruses rather than rooting out political dissent.
Yet she didn’t help herself by replying to a congratulatory Tweet from China’s official Xinhua news service with a public message saying: “Thanks and look forward to closer partnership in the future!” Xinhua, suffice to say, is not renowned for its political independence.
Democracy activists are furious at what they regard as Twitter’s pandering to the autocrats of the Communist Party through the appointment of such a compromised figure. “[Twitter] is a place where we can reveal the truth and which helps us to communicate and cooperate…but Kathy Chen’s appointment destroys all that” said the veteran Beijing-based dissident Hu Jia. “It isn’t just betraying us, but it is also betraying itself and betraying its moral responsibility to a free society.”
It’s worth bearing in mind that the social media landscape in China is very different to that in the West. Hu Jia and the artist Ai Wei Wei are prolific presences on Twitter. But for the vast majority of Chinese citizens the social media site is entirely off the radar because it’s blocked by the “Great Firewall” of China – the vast blanket of online censorship imposed by the Beijing government.
There are believed to be only around 18,000 active Twitter users on the mainland, those who bother to circumvent these controls through various technological fixes. In a country of 1.3 billion people this is, of course, a miniscule number of tweeters. Contrast that with the 500-odd million registered users of Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter (which is routinely censored). “Even if Twitter wasn’t blocked in China, people would still definitely choose Weibo” one Chinese friend tells me.
Hong Kong is not encircled by the Beijing internet firewall. Yet in the former British colony, Twitter tends to be used by intellectuals and journalists. For most people in the territory it is much less popular than Facebook.
Facebook’s future in mainland China is perhaps the most interesting story. The dominant global social network was banned in 2009 but its founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been cosying up to Beijing relentlessly in recent months. In March he met China’s propaganda chief Liu Yunshan and posted a picture of himself cheerily jogging in the smog-choked Tiananmen Square (promoting much scorn online).
Zuckerberg, whose wife is Chinese, clearly wants back into China. But what will he have to surrender to gain access? Yahoo! notoriously assisted the Chinese authorities in tracking down online dissidents more than a decade ago. Google effectively pulled out of China in 2010 when it tired of Beijing’s demands that it filter its search results. But now Google wants to return too. And this all comes at a time when the Chinese president Xi Jinping is cracking down on internal political dissent with a vigour not seen, according to some, since the days of Mao Zedong.
No matter the true motivations behind Ms Chen’s appointment, it is pretty clear which way Silicon Valley is leaning in the great trade-off between free speech and commercial advantage in China. And it is down into the kowtow position.
Ben Chu is the author of Chinese Whispers: Why Everything You've Heard About China is Wrong
