Cisco and China: the Evil Business of Doing Business With Evil
Doing business in China poses many problems. Doing business with China's regime poses many more serious problems. Ask Cisco (CSCO) which must now decide between corporate profit and human life.
Cisco has been brought in by China's Hikvision Digital Technology to help with a police surveillance system in the city of Chongqing. Hewlett-Packard (HP) is also expected to bid on the system which is soothingly called the Peaceful Chongqing project. It is a citywide network of up to half a million cameras which officials say will be used to prevent crime.
Undoubtedly it will be. The conundrum is what is defined as a crime and the nature of the organization doing the preventing. Here's what the U.S. State Department had to say about China and those two issues:
Principal human rights problems during the year included: extrajudicial killings, including executions without due process; enforced disappearance and incommunicado detention, including prolonged illegal detentions at unofficial holding facilities known as "black jails"; torture and coerced confessions of prisoners.So let's not fool ourselves about how Chongqing will be made more peaceful.
A "key question" for corporations
The WSJ says this raises a key question for both corporations and governments: "Should companies be held accountable if foreign governments use their products for political suppression?" Actually the question is far less abstract than that: "What do you tell your children?"
For HP's Todd Bradley, the executive vice president who oversees China strategy, the answer is, "It's not my job to really understand what they're going to use if for." Ah, "I was just filling orders." An excuse that never really goes out of style, despite being totally inexcusable.
Ultimately this is an individual decision far more than a corporate one. As long as there are individuals like Mr. Bradley then the corporations will just go along as they have so many times in the past.
Google has been the preferred case study for the real costs of doing business in China in large part because of its claims about believing in democracy on the Internet and its statement that "You can make money without doing evil." To no one's surprise, neither claim had any impact on the company's move into China. It was more than happy to censor search results and anything else Beijing asked. But then it became clear the company was being treated with all the care and solicitude that China has given many of its citizens. At which point the company said it was shocked and outraged by all these cyberattacks, etc.
However not all Googlers everywhere are willing to be willing accomplices. Earlier this year in Egypt Wael Ghonim, Google's marketing manager for the region, was arrested for speaking up on the Internet for human rights and against totalitarian repression. The very same things, I suspect, that would be viewed as making Chongqing a far less peaceable place and which would have run afoul of Google's censoring. Ghonim was rightfully held up as an example of putting the interests of your fellow human ahead of your own. I have no doubt he got congratulatory messages from the top folks at Google.
I would love to know how those people looked themselves in the mirror the following morning.
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