Rebecca MacKinnon Picks Sides, All Of Them

Rebecca MacKinnon’s blogsite is a frequent must visit for news and views about the impact and evolution of the internet, particularly in China. She brings deep experience and empathy.

However, Ms. MacKinnon also brings her Obama-like relativism to her reporting.

I hope you'll vote for Obama. He can make us proud to be an American once again in ways that I don't think Clinton will be able to do - though I'll take her over McCain any day. Obama's election would prove that despite my country's considerable hypocrisy, the American dream and the values we claim to espouse actually can mean something real.

She values conversation above all, and treats it as the overriding objective, regardless of impotence with tyrants and thugs.

MacKinnon certainly does not excuse despots gross behavior, and is a strong voice for their denunciation. But, when push comes to shove, she backs up.

Her discussion of the current repression in Tibet provides a prime example.

MacKinnon decries the split loyalties of American web portals operating in China, like Yahoo which relies only on the official Peking line in its news. She recognizes they are in effect arms of the Chinese state, in their pursuit of local profits. But, MacKinnon has elsewhere in her blog backed away from Congressional proposals to hold such American companies to account for aiding censorship. That leaves her impotent in the face of repression, just calling it a “lose-lose.”

Yahoo! China and MSN and all the other foreign-branded web businesses in China are caught between a rock and a hard spot in times of crisis such as the Tibet riots. There will be more such tight spots to come. In China, the Internet portals are not allowed to run original news reporting and are required to run news reports from a set of approved sources. That means that on any given story, you aren't going to get any news on any major story that the government didn't want disseminated. These portals receive feeds from approved news sources which they republish without editors giving too much thought to the "news angle" being portrayed, because it's the only angle available. During normal times, this is just a fact of life and is not particularly remarked upon. In times of crisis, when China and the West see things very differently, it becomes much more problematic. Since there's no way to run a web portal without following the rules about news sources, either you follow the rules or you don't bother doing business….

I'm actually starting to think that over the long run it may turn out to be impossible for multinationals to run commercially successful local news and user-generated content portals in local markets other than their home markets, plus markets that are politically similar or sufficiently aligned to the home country geopolitically. If you're in a market whose geopolitical interests and world view are vastly different from the home market, I don't see how you avoid this kind of "lose-lose" situation in inevitable times of crisis.

Similarly, MacKinnon has sympathy for the Tibetans, but starting from a premise of the legitimacy of China’s rule over them again finds herself in a moral dead-end of equating their resistance to oppression and cultural extinction with the police powers of China. A lot of nice and easy platitudes, without any physical or moral fiber.

For a person to kill and injure other human beings who haven't directly endangered one's own life is always wrong. The rioters who committed violent acts have sadly discredited their movement (which has never been unified in its goals and tactics, anyway, which in addition to PRC thuggishness is another reason why it hasn't gotten much of anywhere). Is the Chinese government going to handle the aftermath with sensitivity and fairness? I've seen little precedent for it. If the Chinese government wants to prove it can sort things out with sensitivity and fairness they shouldn't have kicked out the foreign media. Do I think that the Chinese government is manipulating information? Yes, because from my long experience living in China, they always have. Do I think a lot of the Western media are over-simplifying the situation, playing to their audiences' desire for a "freedom fighters vs. communist thugs" story line and getting lots of facts wrong? Also yes. Do I think that the Chinese government's treatment of Tibet created genuine anger which made an eventual violent outburst likely if not inevitable? Yes again. Do I think that the Tibetan people's lives would be better off if outside powers were to support a civil war of independence? No. Do I think that the Tibetan people's lives (and the lives of many other ethnicities who now live in Tibet) would be better off if China granted independence to Tibet tomorrow? It's questionable. Would Tibet be free of human rights problems if it became independent tomorrow? I don't think so either. That's why the Dalai Lama advocated some kind of negotiated autonomy instead of independence as the only realistic solution at this point. The riots have likely killed that possibility. But to say the Chinese government is blameless because ethnic Tibetans committed deplorable violence last week is just as naive as to claim that the Tibetan rioters were heroes.

Again, Rebecca MacKinnon is a valuable voice. But, she also typifies the conversational vacuity and impotence of an Obama-like approach to questions of right and wrong, which leaves those dependent upon the United States deserted when push comes to shove. And, the tyrants laughing up their sleeve at the knowledge they can get away with it.