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| Home Front: Politix | |
| Bill Clinton Is Yahoo!s Yahoo? | |
| 2005-09-14 | |
| From WSJ (subscription page) Former U.S. President Bill Clinton insists that he knew nothing about Yahoo collaborating in the arrest of a Chinese journalist when he spoke at a Yahoo-related Internet event in China last weekend. He asserts open letters from two organizations warning him about Yahoo's role in the controversial matter never reached him. He apparently also didn't hear the company's co-founder scrambling to explain the affair at the same conference. "I would've raised it in the speech to the Internet people had I known about it," Mr. Clinton maintained later.
We also know that Reporters Without Borders, which issued the open letter along with Human Rights in China, faxed a copy of the letter to the Clinton Foundation in New York on Friday morning. That left its staff enough time to tell the former president before his speech Saturday that a journalist had been convicted and jailed for the simple act of writing an email about press restrictions in China. Yahoo helped the authorities track down Mr. Shi by supplying them with his IP address, and is now facing growing calls for a boycott. Most major papers had the story -- this newspaper and the Financial Times carried both a story and an editorial -- that Yahoo was involved in this controversy on Thursday, 48 hours before Mr. Clinton was due to speak at the Yahoo-related event in China. Of course, the Shi case is but the latest example of Western Internet companies kowtowing to Chinese authorities. Mr. Clinton could have mentioned Microsoft not letting Chinese clients of its MSN Spaces use words such as "democracy," "freedom" or "human rights." (Microsoft sends its Chinese clients a window warning them not to use "profanity" when they do). Or he could have mentioned Google agreeing to censor its news site in China. Mr. Clinton could have talked about that. It was after all a forum addressing the Internet in China. Mr. Clinton somehow found time to address the threat to the environment in China. The Associated Press, a wire service not really known for any anti-Clinton bias, found this puzzling too. This was its lead: "HANGZHOU, China (AP) Former U.S. President Bill Clinton urged China on Saturday to recognize the urgency of the environmental threats to its growth, and to use the Internet as a tool to surmount them. But he remained silent on the risks faced by those who use the Internet as a forum for dissent." Mr. Clinton also found time to undercut his country's foreign policy on the key matter of China's arms' build-up. The U.S. secretaries of state and defense, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, have questioned why China's military needs to grow at the spectacular rate it has done recently. But Mr. Clinton sought to put distance between himself and these sentiments, observing, "Once someone else becomes as rich as we are, then whether we have the only big military in the world is their choice, not ours." What this has to do with the Internet in China is of course not that clear. But we do remember the neglect of the U.S. military during the Clinton years. The former U.S. president is no longer in command of the American armed forces or of its foreign policy, but China's leaders do read newspapers and know that his wife seems to be preparing to run for the presidency in 2008. His words, therefore, carry weight. Again and again we hear from people inside China's government that Western criticism does make a difference. Mr. Clinton's political party, meanwhile, continues to press in Congress for laws that would it make it more difficult for China to trade with the U.S. It bears repeating that the way to deal with China is to encourage its commercial engagement with the world and discourage its militaristic and repressive tactics. Vintage Bubba -- won't find this in MSM | |
| Posted by:Captain America |
| #2 But we do remember the neglect of the U.S. military during the Clinton years. But he didn't neglect the Chinese military. |
| Posted by: Jackal 2005-09-14 14:05 |
| #1 Some things never change. |
| Posted by: dushan 2005-09-14 10:30 |