Former U.S. President Bill Clinton's foundation received an undisclosed sum in exchange for his keynote address at an event held by Alibaba, the Chinese internet company that controls China Yahoo* and has been accused of aiding China's crackdown in Tibet.
China Yahoo posted images of individuals sought by the government.
(Credit: France24 via Rebecca MacKinnon)Some activists are trying to tie this money to Sen. Hillary Clinton, saying it conflicts with her statements on China. In addition to claiming she "stood up to" China's government in a speech while Bill was president, she has said President George W. Bush should not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games in August because of the recent events in Tibet.
Bill's foundation took Alibaba's money. Alibaba has been criticized recently for an incident in which Yahoo.cn posted a "most wanted" page with photographs of individuals the government sought in connection with the recent unrest. Here, according to the Los Angeles Times how one activist makes the connection from there to Hillary's position:
"A former president of the United States received a donation from a Chinese firm that is involved in censorship, and now his wife is running for president. This is a shame of the U.S.," said Harry Wu, an exiled Chinese activist based in Washington.
I'm all for responsibility with money in politics, but I think this is a stretch. Wu references China Yahoo's censorship of search results. But Microsoft's MSN and Google both also censor results in their Chinese versions. Should candidates then be penalized for taking money from Bill Gates or Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Oh right, the question is, should candidates' spouses be penalized for having any relationship involving money with these three or their companies?
I think it would be hard to make a principled argument that didn't condemn all of the candidates if closely examined. If you want to condemn them all for dealing with money in politics, I won't blame you.
* I have not always been perfectly clear on this. China Yahoo is a subsidiary of Alibaba and is no longer controlled by Yahoo itself, despite the name.
Yahoo China and MSN China both briefly posted a "most wanted" list with photos of people Chinese authorities are trying to track down surrounding the recent events in Tibet, a French TV website reports.
Rebecca MacKinnon reports that the lists were down when she checked, and offers a guess as to what happened:
I wouldn't be surprised if the local editors just automatically ran it because everybody else in China was running it, then got over-ridden by management in the U.S. who realized how badly this would play outside of China... Such is the disconnect between China and the West on the Tibet issue.
Yahoo has an especially public history of aiding Chinese authorities in a much more proactive way, most famously in the Shi Tao case, when Yahoo gave authorities identifying information about online comments led to Shi Tao's imprisonment. Yahoo has scarcely heard the end of that, and its representatives, as well as some from Microsoft, have been called before U.S. Congressional committees. (Now the company's blog has called for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to push for his release.)
Wherever you stand on these issues of cooperation with law enforcement, companies would be wise to think before they post.
UPDATE: Xinhua reports that portals including Yahoo had published the material.
From The Times of London:
A former Chinese university professor who was dismissed after he founded a democratic opposition party, plans to sue Yahoo and Google in the United States for blocking his name from search results in China.
Guo Quan, an expert on classical Chinese literature and the 1937 Nanjing massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops, last week issued an open letter pledging to bring a lawsuit against Google after he discovered that his name had been excised in searches of its Google.cn portal in China.
He told The Times that he had now found that the Chinese Yahoo site had also blocked his name and that he planned to bring actions against both companies. "Since January 1, a lot of friends told me that Web sites with my name had been closed. They told me it's impossible to search for my information on Google and Yahoo."
I won't pretend to be a lawyer, but it seems unlikely that Guo will be successful. He acknowledges that there's no chance in Chinese court, but it would be interesting if he succeeds in bringing a suit against the companies in U.S. court.
See The Times' full article, "Dissident Chinese professor to sue Yahoo! and Google for erasing his name." Hat tip goes to Techdirt.
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