Commission To Look at U.S. Role in China Censorship
China coerces U.S. businesses into censoring the Internet, said Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., Wednesday at a meeting of the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission in Washington. The commission should recommend action that Congress can take to help U.S. companies push back, he said. The panel will consider the issues raised by Smith when it finalizes its report to Congress this fall on the national security implications of U.S.-China trade, said commission member Robin Cleveland.
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"In the world of Internet repression, ‘The Great Firewall of China’ sets the standard for worst practices,” said Smith, a frequent critic of the country’s human rights record. “If we accept these business practices as ‘normal’ we'll become desensitized, shrug our shoulders at violations of a basic right -- freedom of expression -- that has always been a hallmark of who we are as a people.”
U.S. IT companies such as Google want to “do the right thing” but are under tremendous pressure from the Beijing government to comply with authoritarian rule, Smith said. “Google’s difficulties in China make it clearer than ever that, however well-intentioned, American IT companies are not powerful enough to stand up to a repressive government like the Chinese.” Congress should help them by passing the Global Online Freedom Act, he said. Smith introduced such a bill in 2006 and again in this Congress. HR-2271 would require U.S. IT companies to store personal identification information outside of Internet-restricting countries and give the attorney general authority to order IT companies to refuse requests for such information. “I ask the members of the commission, and everyone here today, to take a good look at this bill,” Smith said.
"We are interested in ways American financial enterprises participate in underwriting censorship in China,” Cleveland said. “The course of these hearings is to learn.” She was especially interested in a story Smith told of a visit to a Beijing cybercafe during the 2008 Olympics. Smith tried to access his congressional website but was blocked by Chinese filters. He was also blocked from accessing other congressional websites and said when doing a search for “torture” he did not come up with a single mention of Chinese human rights violations. Americans view the Internet as a free-flowing river of information, but it is a tool of repression and censorship in China, Cleveland said.