Google flirting with the totalitarian regime of China

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) accused the Internet search engine Google on Wednesday with supporting the totalitarian regime of China with "opportunist self-censorship”. "If Google now shares in the construction of a digital Chinese wall then the search engine becomes the accomplice of an unjust regime, which is systematically misusing the internet to secure its own rule of terror”, criticised the GfbV Asia expert, Ulrich Delius, the "flirting” of Google with Peking. With its controversial China policy the search engine is disregarding its own company philosophy, since it is contributing, not to the dissemination of news, but to its suppression.

Google committed itself yesterday to submitting to the strict Chinese censure regulations, in order to be able to offer an internet search service in the People’s Republic. In this way 110 internet users are declared mentally immature, said Delius.” They will look in vain with the new Chinese search engine for information on the persecution of the meditation group Falun Gong, the oppression in Tibet and Xinjiang (East Turkistan) and on the repression of Christians.”

The Chinese authorities are tightening the free use of the internet with constant new laws and regulations. On 25th September 2005 a new regulation was published, according to which only "healthy and civilised news may be disseminated, which serve the improvement of the quality of the nation”. Strictly forbidden is the dissemination of "rumours” and "information running contrary to state security and the public interest or stirring up ethnic violence”.

Sine 2003 the Chinese authorities have built up an internet police, with a strength of some 30,000 officers. Not only do they control the internet cafés, but they have the task of disseminating government propaganda. Several thousand officers were given the job of joining chat-rooms and justifying the actions of the authorities in the face of criticism without declaring their own identity.