From where we stand right now, for reasons no one would begrudge, the enactment of health care reform is the most significant story of the week (except, apparently, if you're MeGyn Kelley on Fox "News.") I wonder though, if forty years from now, the story that will figure more prominently in the history books is the one that came down today: that Google left China for Hong Kong, conceding the Chinese market to the Chinese search engine Baidu.
This -- and I'm just riffing here -- may be seen as the point where the two global "parties" staked out their territory. Many believe that we are entering the Chinese century (or maybe the Sino-Indian century), which is not to say that the U.S. and Europe won't continue to wield substantial power and influence. If so, this is a defining moment where these nascent global parties begin the stake out their positions on the question of what sort of world we want to create.
Barring some nuclear explosions or environmental catastrophes -- neither of which, of course, being things that we seem prepared to bar -- it looks like China will continue its massive economic expansion and India will be, increasingly, chasing within shouting distance behind it, probably continuing to be viewed as the Euro-American friendlier of the two emerging global powers.
Both "communist" China and Euro-American oriented India will offer the world largely capitalistic futures; the question remains as to the degree to which that capitalism will have "a human face" -- including when it comes to environmental sustainability. That's one struggle for us to have this century, but it's not one that divides the world along "state-partisan" lines. Within every country, there will be those who fight for economic and environmental justice and those who want to ignore it so as to buttress the bottom line. Back when the world was divided into "first" (Euro-U.S.+Japan) and "second" (Soviet bloc) and "third" (everyone else, including China and India) worlds, each "world" had people who were on both sides of this divide. (Some of you may try to deny that there was much pressure for this in the old Soviet bloc. Tell it to Mikhail Gorbachev.) That's not the partisan divide of this century.
The partisan divide, about which everyone will have to take an individual stand and every state a collective one, involves cooperation with those who would not honor human rights. Google, as some argue, may be withdrawing from China (to Hong Kong) for sound business reasons -- burnishing its "don't be evil" credo with its Euro-American fan base and with dissident elements in China, leaving a market where it wasn't going to do all that well anyway -- but there's an audacity to walking away from the world's largest market over the issue of censorship, which reaches into the heart of Google's business, that still makes one sit up and take note. Symbolically, this is a moment to remember: Google saying that it will not play by China's repressive rules, and damn the consequences.
This act of defiance is going to reverberate through global culture for years. This act of defiance is going to cause others to have to choose their sides. It just got harder for a global corporation to go along with repression of people and suppression of information. When corporations do so, they will be following in Google's footsteps.
You can make a cogent argument for cooperating with repression and suppression ("for the greater good," of course, always and obviously and never quite so) in national governance, just like you can make a cogent argument for Republican principles (well, many of them, anyway.) These are not differences in good versus evil, although I know which one I favor; they are much like differences in party. Do you give up the ability to influence China by refusing to play along? Back when we recognized "Red China," it was the liberals who answered that question "no, we should engage them!" Today it is the conservatives. I don't know what the right answer is; I just know to what party I belong.
Google refuses to cooperate with censorship; Baidu cooperates. The party lines are drawn. (Yes, Yahoo and Microsoft and certainly Murdoch's empire also cooperate, but they are not the ones who will dominate information gathering in the world's emerging economic power.)
The Whole World Is Watching, anti-war protesters used to say, and while I don't know if that was true of your average Vietnam War protest I do think that the whole world will be watching what happens to Google and Baidu now. Which party will win -- short term and long?
What I find heartening is that being part of the Google Party in this century may be a very good role for Americans and Europeans to play on the world stage. Certainly, many Americans citizens -- both natural and corporate -- will join the Baidu Party instead. (Rupert Murdoch is a charter member of the party, after all.) But when we honor human rights, meaning human intellectual rights as well, we live up, I believe, to the best of our national tradition.
If our opposition eventually leads to reform in the areas dominated by the Baidu Party -- if China realizes that it can let its citizenry search for information about the three "T"s of Tibet, Taiwan, and Tienanmen without deep existential fear -- then we will have done the Chinese citizenry a service. (Perhaps they will come up with a way to dislodge us from the control of our corporate media as well, in return. I certainly don't mean to ignore the log in my own society's eye.)
China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many other powers will spend much of the early part of this century firmly fixed on information control. Some parts of American culture will do so as well. If we all fall in line behind the Baidu Party, then the belief that countries can do whatever they want to within their borders -- just like the old days when "a man's home was his castle" and he had the right to beat his wife there without social inspection and intervention -- will win out. If we are willing to walk away from concessions to repression -- and in searching for a historical analog to Google's action I've realized that it feels less like storming the Bastille or dumping British tea into the Atlantic than Gandhi grinding his own salt or the resistance of the civil rights movement -- then we do built a better world. Or, at least, that's what I think as a partisan of the Google Party (though one with a Yahoo e-mail address.)
This was a symbolically significant and emotionally resonant action that Google took today, whatever its motivation and whatever its economic effect. I don't think it denigrates the accomplishment of the health reform bill to say that I think that it may be long remembered, someday the subject of tales, someday the topic of songs.
The Google Party is born. It says that we shouldn't be evil and that keeping information hidden is evil. That is a platform I can support. In fact, it sounds pleasingly familiar.