Internet crackdown: to do business in China, American companies have to play by Beijing's rules, even if doing so puts innocent people in jail.

For Wang Xiaoning, a political activist in Communist China, the fateful knock at the door came on September 1, 2002--an otherwise peaceful Sunday morning. According to the account provided by Luke O'Brien of Wired News, the phone rang that morning while Wang was working at his computer in the Beijing duplex he shared with his wife, Yu Ling, and their son. When Wang answered the phone, a voice on the other side asked simply: "Are you home?" When Wang answered, "Yes," the line went dead. Moments later, at least 10 agents of the communist state burst through his door in a violent raid. Confiscating his computer equipment, computer discs, written notes, manuscripts, and address books, they took Wang into custody and left.

On their way out they gave an official notice to the shocked and frightened Yu Ling: "Keep quiet." Since then, Yu Ling hasn't seen her husband except for one half-hour-long prison visit per month. His crime? Calling for political reform of China's single-party communist political system.

Wang Xiaoning's case is just one among thousands--if not millions--of cases in which political dissidents have been jailed in China, thrust into the communist state's repressive labor and reeducation camps. But Wang's case, like a handful of others, is different from most. Like millions, he is the victim of the communist oligarchy in Beijing, a totalitarian despotism that recognizes no rights and that rules with an iron fist. But unlike the millions of other unfortunates that fall afoul of China's state security apparatus, Wang's ticket to the regime's torture and reeducation camps was provided by an American company--pioneering Internet firm Yahoo! Inc.

Now, in what some are calling a landmark case, Yu Ling, with the assistance of the World Organization for Human Rights USA, has filed a lawsuit on behalf of herself and her husband against Yahoo ! in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco.

Prelude to Prison

From 2000 until his arrest in 2002, Wang, who has heroically campaigned for a free China for decades, worked as editor of the electronic journals Free Forum of Political Reform and Commentaries on Current Political Affairs. Both journals carried articles by Wang and others calling for a variety of reforms in China's political system, including the legalization of opposition political parties. While working as editor, Wang also wrote other articles on similar subjects and posted them for a time to a Yahoo! user group identified as "aaabbbccc." In his writings Wang lamented, "China is still an authoritarian dictatorship," and he reminded his readers that in China to this day "workers and peasants have been suppressed into the lowest level of society. Tens of millions of workers are unemployed and many workers are cruelly exploited and oppressed" and have "no protection for their most basic rights."

For Wang, as for other dissidents in Communist China, posting political opinions online calling for reform is a dangerous occupation. According to the OpenNet Initiative, an organization that investigates "state filtration and surveillance practices" online, "China's Internet filtering regime is the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world," making it next to impossible for dissidents to freely publish their views without, eventually, getting caught. Though Wang was seemingly able to remain somewhat anonymous for a time, the censors were soon on to him.

According to the complaint filed by Yu Ling, "In 2001, administrators noticed the political content of Wang's writings and blocked him from sending messages to the "aaabbbccc" Yahoo! Group." Not deterred, Wang continued writing, anonymously sending his articles on the need for political reform and freedom in China to a select list of email addresses.

In this he should have been safe. After all, he was e-mailing anonymously using his Yahoo! affiliated account. Chinese authorities should have had no way to track him down through the Yahoo! system, operated as it was by an American company. But unbeknownst to Wang and his family, as a condition of doing business in China, Yahoo! had agreed to play by Beijing's rules.

According to the complaint, "In or around the Spring of 2002, Yahoo! Inc. signed an official, voluntary agreement that had the effect of directly involving Yahoo! in the censoring and monitoring of on-line content and communication by its Chinese users. This agreement was in the form of the Internet Society of China's 'Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the Chinese Internet Industry.'" Under the terms of the pledge, portions of which were published online by PC World in 2002, Yahoo! agreed to "monitor the information publicized by users on Web sites according to [Chinese] law and remove the harmful information promptly." In another part of the pledge, Yahoo! agreed to "inspect and monitor the information on [Chinese] domestic and foreign Web sites that have been accessed and refuse access to those Web sites that disseminate harmful information in order to protect the Internet users of China from the adverse influence of the harmful information."

In other words, Yahoo! agreed to help Beijing censor the Internet. But that was not all Yahoo! agreed to do. According to the complaint in the Wang Xiaoning case, the Internet Society of China maintains that, under its pledge, Internet service providers like Yahoo! are also required "to report any offending on-line expression or communication to PRC [People's Republic of China] authorities." That meant turning over the identities of anonymous online political dissidents to Beijing's Internet Gestapo. And that led to Wang's arrest. According to the complaint against Yahoo!, "Yahoo! HK provided identifying information to police, linking Wang Xiaoning to his anonymous e-mails and other pro-democracy Internet communications." He is now serving a 10-year sentence simply for calling for the same basic and intrinsic freedoms enjoyed by Yahoo!'s American business execs.

Just Obeying the Law

For its part, Yahoo! says it is just obeying the law and that it has no idea why the Chinese government requests user information or how that information is used once it's turned over to authorities. Compliance, Yahoo! says, is just a condition of business in China, just as it is in other nations--the United States included.

In testimony to the Congressional Subcommittees on Africa, Global Human Rights and Asia and the Pacific on February 15, 2006, Michael Callaban, a senior vice president for Yahoo!, addressed the challenges the company faces in complying with Chinese law. "When we receive a demand from law enforcement authorized under the law of the country in which we operate, we must comply," Callahan said in remarks related to the jailing of another dissident, Shi Tao, who was arrested under conditions very similar to those that led to the arrest of Wang Xiaoning. "This is a real example of why this issue is bigger than any one company and any one industry. All companies must respond in the same way. When a foreign telecommunications company operating in the United States receives an order from U.S. law enforcement, it must comply. Failure to comply in China could have subjected Yahoo! China and its employees to criminal charges, including imprisonment. Ultimately, U.S. companies in China face a choice: comply with Chinese law, or leave."

For the most part, U.S. Internet companies doing business in China have agreed to play ball with Beijing. Among the most notable has been Google, the iconic search engine and Internet technology company. Despite its corporate motto of "Don't be evil," in January of 2006 the company voluntarily launched a new search engine for China--www.google.cn--that was compliant with Chinese demands for censorship. "To obey China's censorship laws, Google's representatives explained, the company had agreed to purge its search results of any Web sites disapproved of by the Chinese government, including Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a government-banned spiritual movement; sites promoting free speech in China; or any mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre," the New York Times reported in April 2006. "If you search for 'Tibet' or 'Falun Gong' most anywhere in the world on google.com, you'll find thousands of blog entries, news items and chat rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same search inside China on google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone. Google will have erased them completely."

Google continues to defend its participation in censorship efforts. According to a May 2 report in Network World, "Google's board of directors has recommended shareholders next week vote down a proposal that would require the company to legally resist government censorship efforts and to notify users when the company is required by governments to censor search results." And Google is not alone. Other companies that have agreed not to breach Beijing's "Great Firewall of China" include Skype (partnered with an Internet firm controlled by billionaire Li Ka-shing, who is linked to the People's Republic of China), Microsoft (which shut down a blog at Beijing's request), and others. According to Business Week, "scores of other outfits, both domestic and foreign, have made concessions to China's censors."

How does Beijing pull this off? The answer is fear. "The penalty for noncompliance with censorship regulations can be serious," the New York Times noted in 2006. "An American public-relations consultant who recently worked for a major domestic Chinese portal recalled an afternoon when Chinese police officers burst into the company's offices, dragged the C.E.O. into a conference room and berated him for failing to block illicit content. 'He was pale with fear afterward,' she said. 'You have to understand, these people are terrified, just terrified. They're seriously worried about slipping up and going to jail. They think about it every day they go into the office.'"

Should Americans Care?

For harried Americans, beset with innumerable demands on their time and with plenty to worry about in domestic policies and politics, Internet-enabled oppression in China may seem far away and almost academic. Sure, the imprisonment of Wang Xiaoning is tragic and unjust. But that kind of behavior can be expected of a communist country, right?

Still, the participation of American firms in enabling oppression in China is immensely troubling. If these companies are willing to sell out to an authoritarian regime overseas, is it reasonable to assume that they will exhibit any great fidelity to constitutional principles at home?

In fact, U.S. companies have already been helping U.S. federal agencies conduct domestic surveillance. There is, for instance, a class-action lawsuit pending against telecommunications giant AT&T accusing the company of helping the National Security Agency illegally wiretap Americans' communications. Moreover, major Internet firms including Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo!, and Google were subpoenaed by the Justice Department in an attempt to get the companies to turn over details of user search-engine queries. All but Google complied in one fashion or another, though it is unclear how much user data was eventually turned over to the Justice Department. To Google's credit this time, the company fought the subpoena and won in an important privacy victory for users of the world's most popular search engine.

Taken as a whole, however, the picture of corporate behavior, whether in China or at home, is not encouraging. Clearly, corporate elitists have been willing to sell out both at home and abroad if it helps improve the bottom line--and the losers are ordinary citizens who live where freedom and liberty are increasingly rare commodities.

RELATED ARTICLE: Imprisoned in China.

When Wang Xiaoning was arrested as a result of his advocacy for reform in China, he was sentenced to 10 years in China's repressive prison system. These prisons bear little resemblance to those that are a par! of the American justice system. Instead, they are based on communist principles developed as part of the old Soviet gulag system. Imprisonment in the gulag system is a nightmare of torture, forced labor, and psychological pressure in the guise of "reeducation," and the effects of that system extend far beyond the prison walls, as Wang Xiaoning's case demonstrates.

According to the complaint against Yahoo!, after his arrest Wang was held at the Detention Center of the Beijing State Security Bureau. There, "officials kicked and beat Wang repeatedly to force him to confess to having engaged in 'anti-state' activities and to turn over the names of other persons with whom he had communicated. Prison guards commanded and instructed other prisoners to use psychological tactics against Wang to break his resolve so that he would confess, and also as punishment for his writings."

After his "conviction" Wang was moved, in 2004, to the Beijing Municipal No. 2 Prison, "a secretive, high-security forced labor prison where serious and 'special control' prisoners are held, particularly political prisoners." There, Wang "has continued to suffer severe physical, psychological, and emotional abuse." According to the complaint, "Wang has been subjected to a severe form of treatment in this prison. He is held in a cell with nine other inmates and subjected to malnourishment. The prison guards deny Wang any access to recreation or even sunlight for weeks and even months at a time."

Wang's imprisonment has made it nearly impossible for his wife, Yu Ling, to carry on with her life. According to her complaint, she "has been subjected to continued police surveillance, which caused her to fear for her own safety and personal security. She feared that the police would arbitrarily arrest her and subject her to physical abuse like her husband. These fears were reinforced by the actions of her family and friends who no longer contacted her out of their own fears for their personal safety and respectability, and also because the police required people coming to visit her to register their names."