Responding to a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China,” Google recently warned that it had begun to “review the feasibility” of its business dealings with China. In addition to the theft of intellectual property, one of the cyber attack’s primary goals was information that would allow access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists, a resource that would be invaluable to Beijing’s campaign against cyber-dissidents, but worthless to nearly everyone else. In light of these developments, Google declared that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn [the company’s China site]” and would soon meet the government to discuss the “basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.” The statement acknowledged that this “may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Almost immediately the blogosphere and twitterverse lit up with praise and blame. Sceptics dismissed the company’s change of heart as too little, too late. Some pointed to Google’s mealy-mouthed explanation, in 2006, of the decision to permit state censorship of its China site in the first place. (“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information… is more inconsistent with our mission.”) As several critics pointed out, if the original rationale still holds true, then a withdrawal from China – especially one provoked by a relatively commonplace security threat – ought to be seen as an abandonment of the mission altogether. Far from standing up for transparency and human rights, they accuse Google of merely grandstanding. Beset by legal and public relations problems elsewhere, tough talk allows the company to score easy points in China while ignoring earlier failures which could have helped to save cyber-dissidents from arrest and imprisonment. On the other hand, more sympathetic observers have suggested that the new thinking owes less to corporate spin and self-interest and more to the company’s emerging philosophy on the need for “open systems” in the age of digital information.

Ever since Karl Popper’s searching analysis of the Open Society, the idea of openness has become virtually synonymous with democracy. Within Google itself, there has been much discussion of what the company’s stated preference for “openness” ought to mean in the real world. Last month, in a post on the company’s Policy Blog, Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s Senior Vice-President for Product Management argued that “Closed systems are well-defined and profitable, but only for those who control them. Open systems are chaotic and profitable [but] evolve more slowly, so placing your bets on open requires the optimism, will, and means to think long term. Fortunately, at Google we have all three of these.” Rosenberg went on to predict that “Open will win … The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom … Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.” If Google sincerely believes that it is facilitating these inevitable freedoms, then its current quarrel with Beijing at least has the virtue of being part of a coherent long-term strategy rather than just a peevish reaction to a security breach.

Google and China have always been strange bedfellows and in many ways their eventual confrontation has seemed inevitable. While Google prides itself on the acquisition and dispersal of information, China’s government has done its best to control, and restrict the flow of knowledge from beyond its borders. (A 2005 Harvard study found that that out of the top 100 sites returned by a Google search for “democracy china,” 40 were blocked.) China leads the world in the persecution of cyber-dissidents and in addition to its censorship of political and human rights information, it blocks sites from Tibet and Taiwan, hundreds of legal websites, servers from American universities such as Caltech, Columbia, and MIT and frequently filters or blocks news from the BBC, CNN, Time magazine and PBS. Much of this censorship has taken place quietly, and received little notice in the West. That is exactly how Beijing would like to keep it. When Liu Xiaobo, a drafter of the historic “Charter 08” was recently given an 11-year prison sentence for “subversion,” the news was broken on Christmas Day, to minimize coverage in the international media.

In their eagerness to do business with Beijing, foreign companies have often ignored human rights issues in China and, emboldened by this pusillanimity, the government has cracked down on its political critics with near total impunity. But like all state censors, China loathes publicity. Hence its fear of Google. The company’s threatened departure could easily trigger a deluge of unwelcome publicity, especially of the government’s murky human rights record. But if the company stays, and online censorship is lifted, the resulting transparency could prove just as damaging. Shortly after Google’s statement, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton observed that “[a] new information curtain is descending across much of the world.” With its usual alacrity in these matters, a Chinese government website retorted that the US should “respect facts and stop using the so-called freedom of the Internet to make unjustified accusations against China.” But behind its bluster Beijing is clearly nervous, for if a large and profitable American company is willing to confront the Chinese government directly, then its audacity will almost certainly encourage further acts of insubordination.

With respect to Google, Beijing is largely powerless, for while Google can easily survive the loss of its China business, few in the Chinese Politburo believe they will survive a loss of censorship. In some respects the showdown with Google is the continuation of diplomacy by other means. Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of a forthcoming book on Google, has written that “One could read [the situation] as a classic international power conflict between a major traditional state and a new, virtual state: the Googlenet. Google is taking a risky stand to defend the Internet generally. This is what a weaker, threatened state would do.” If Google does prevail, then it will have succeeded where 20 years of US foreign policy have failed. At a stroke it will have sent a message around the world that traditional censorship cannot survive the revolutionary technologies of the Internet. Military and economic power may not deter China, and its government appears to have mastered the dark arts of negotiation at Copenhagen and elsewhere, but the prospect of an Open Society is a far more unsettling affair. Where “optimism, will, and means to think long term” leads the way, a lot of troublesome freethinking is bound to follow. That is a lesson which strikes fear into the heart of repressive regimes everywhere.