Up until now, until finally Google called, "Enough!" all too many businesses in the US and elsewhere have shamelessly kowtowed to the dictates of the Trolls of Beijing. Blinded by the prospects of profits to be made in the Land of A Billion Chinese, companies and the people who run them have been willing not only to ignore the multitude of unpleasant practices engaged in by the Trolls but, in essence, trade with and strengthen an enemy of the United States.
A decade and more ago when Congress was fired up to deny China most-favored-nation status due to its wholesale, recurrent abuses of human rights, the US Chamber of Commerce carried Beijing's water on the Hill, lobbying overtime to prevent the action. The Chamber and its members, all card carrying members of the League of Global Capitalism, made mighty moans about how stripping China of most-favored-nation position would cost American jobs beyond count, plunge the US into recession without end, and be generally icky-poo in the extreme.
Congress maintained its tradition of heeding those who pay and backed down. The Trolls kept on repressing and grinning all the way to the bank.
As had been the case since the days when a man of no brains named McKinley occupied the Oval, American businessmen have deluded themselves with the myth of the China market--the notion of selling widgets beyond counting to hundreds of millions of Chinese. When not chasing the hallucinatory sales of widgets, the capitalists of this and other countries have dreamed of loaning dollars in shipload quantities to China and building projects dwarfing the Great Wall in both size and expense.
American administrations of both parties have acted to facilitate these chimera chases and snipe hunts. From the Open Door policy which held China to be open to all exploiters equally right on to the "opening" of China during the days of Clinton, American leaders have assured themselves and We the People that the only consequences would be beneficial: good for China, great for the American worker and consumer, and, generally, wonderful for the world.
Throughout all, American administrations and businesses have acted as if they were the stereotyped "city slicker" and the Chinese the equally one dimensional rube, a hick ripe for fleecing. In so doing we have overlooked that in story and song alike the rube always outsmarted the slicky boy at the end.
Life has imitated art. China has won. The US and others in the West have lost. We have lost jobs. We have lost money. We have lost global status and influence. We have even lost our values, our principles, our views of what is right.
Insofar as we have lost, the Trolls of Beijing have won. They have won because they understood a basic which seemingly has eluded our political masters.
And, you ask, what might that be, Geek?
Well, bucko, the fundamental reality which has governed our economic relations with China and, all that flows from that relationship is simply this: A corporation has only one responsibility--maximize return on equity to investors. That's it. Nothing else matters unless it is specifically prohibited or required by law.
Ship American jobs offshore? Sure. It's legal. And, profitable. Gut the US manufacturing sector? Sure, why not? Heck, making things is horse and buggy thinking. What about human rights, human costs, even the long term consequences to the US, its security, its national interests? Hell, boy, that ain't in our job description! And, it isn't in the interests of our investors.
Well, what about assuring a hostile government has the ways and means to build a formidable military capacity? Hey, Geek, that isn't in our job description either. That's for the Washington crowd, not us to worry about.
The same can and is said, at least tacitly, implicitly, when the subjects of Chinese espionage or Chinese opposition to foreign policy demarches of the US are raised. Business leaders point out that this sort of matter exists in the bailiwick of government, not private enterprise.
Of course the hyper-focus of business on profits, return on equity, is both proper and justified. It is all that is required. It is what Lenin recognized when he famously said, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." It is what the Trolls of Beijing have recognized as well.
The only difference between Lenin (and his successors) and the Trolls of the past twenty or so years is that the Trolls have done an infinitely better job of inveigling our capitalists (and administrations) into selling the rope with which we are being hung. Everything has gone in the best possible way from Beijing's perspective.
They cozened us, played the right sort of mood music as long as they needed more dollars, more investment, more "co-production," more access to our markets. As the need for dollars, for investment, for access decreased as it has over the past few years, so also has the playing of soft music and the saying of happy words. Now the Trolls demand, they yell, "Cold War thinking," when our government calls them out on a particularly egregious offense; they obstruct our foreign policy initiatives.
Until now, no one has stood up to the Trolls.
Google has good, very good--and more then simply sufficient--reason to tell the Trolls, "You have finally overplayed your hand." Google stands to lose a great deal of money by having taken a principled stand against the Trolls' censorship, hacking, and cyberespionage. Google has taken the very real risk that its competitors (including Microsoft which has the corporate ethics of the Mafia at best) will now have an open field in the very lucrative China market.
It is to be hoped (and, the Geek, being a historian, knows full well how faint this hope is) that Google's and, now, GoDaddy's decisions will shame other IT companies into following the new trail of defiance to the Trolls. It may even be hoped (an even fainter hope) that non-IT companies will be similarly embarrassed if they do not tell the Trolls that their conduct is unacceptable to a business possessing even the slightest hint of ethics. Embarrassment might just lead to action--the right sort of action.
While it is not at all in the realm of rationality to expect the Obama administration to back Google's play in the furtherance of our own national security and strategic interests, it is not quite so far over the edge to think that there is some possibility that Google's action will inspire some of us in We the People to do our small bit in slowing the Chinese juggernaut. It is not enough, not by a long way, for We the People to recognize that China is a real and growing threat to our global status as has been indicated in recent opinion polls.
The need is not for mere recognition. The need is for action. Or, to err on the side of accuracy, inaction. The inaction which is necessary is that of not buying any product of Chinese manufacture regardless of the brand and, far more importantly, price. China has seduced us, mulcted us and the businesses which service us, by the flood of cheap priced products.
That's right, bucko, it is time for us to tell Walmart and all the other purveyors of Chinese origin goods, "We aren't buying those any more." To put it bluntly, to use what the Trolls would brand as "Cold War rhetoric," it is time for us to stop trading with the enemy.
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