Yahoo is lobbying for better human rights in China after being accused of helping the Communist authorities catch dissidents
In Jonathan Swift’s novel “Gulliver’s Travels”, the eponymous hero’s fourth voyage brings him to the land of the Yahoos, who are described as “contemptible creatures of mean intelligence, full of gross meanness, lasciviousness, greediness, foulness, and other base passions of an irrational creature”.
As one of the finest satirists of his day, Swift’s depiction of the Yahoos was seen as a commentary on what he saw as the materialism and venality of early Georgian society. However, the description has resonance with the 21st century’s Yahoo, the internet company.
In November 2007, US House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Tom Lantos told the company’s founder: “Technically and financially, you are giants, but morally, you are pygmies.”
For many years, internet companies seemed to be immune from many of the corporate responsibility dilemmas faced by their peers in business. But things began to change in 2005, when leading search engines were revealed to be bowing to censorship pressure from the authorities in China. Type searches such as “democracy”, “Tiananmen Square”, or “liberty” into, for example, Yahoo’s Chinese site and no documents would be returned.
Chinese government censorship was soon shown to be spreading to blog sites. Blog entries on some parts of Microsoft’s MSN site in China using words such as “freedom”, “democracy” and “demonstration” are being blocked. Those using these banned words get a pop-up warning that reads: “This message contains a banned expression, please delete this expression.”
However, matters moved to an altogether more serious level in 2005 when Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist, was sentenced to ten years in prison for having shared with foreigners a message that his newspaper had received from Chinese authorities, warning it not to overplay the 15th anniversary of the killing of pro-democracy demonstrators near Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Complicity
The evidence to convict him came, at least in part, from Yahoo. Chinese officials approached Yahoo’s Hong Kong office, which divulged the personal details Shi had used to register his huoyan1989@yahoo.com.cn address.
In early 2006, the US House Foreign Affairs Committee began to investigate these allegations, and those against other US-based internet companies. In testimony to the House, Yahoo’s general counsel, Michael Callahan, said the company had no idea why the Chinese authorities wanted to track down Shi. At the end of 2007, members of Congress vilified this testimony. The official enquiry report stated Yahoo had been “at best inexcusably negligent” and at worst “deceptive” in its evidence. Committee chairman Lantos was rather more colourful in his language.
In August last year the World Organisation for Human Rights brought a lawsuit against Yahoo, accusing the company of complicity in human rights abuses and in torture. The case was brought on behalf of Shi, and another dissident, Wang Xiaoning, who was also jailed for ten years, in his case for “incitement to subvert state power” after publishing pro-democracy material online.
At first Yahoo tried to get the case thrown out, arguing it had no choice but to comply with Chinese law in providing information to the Beijing authorities. However, a few days after Lantos’s attack, Yahoo reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of Shi and Wang.
Human rights fund
At the time little was known about the settlement beyond a commitment by the company to pay the families’ legal bills and to create a human rights fund to “provide support to other political dissidents and their families”.
However, in February this year it came to light that part of the settlement was Yahoo’s agreement to lobby for the release of the journalists. In a letter to US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice ahead of her visit to Beijing, Yahoo’s chief executive, Jerry Yang, argued: “It is essential for our government – led by the State Department – to actively pursue the release of Shi Tao, Wang Xiaoning and other Chinese dissidents who have been imprisoned for exercising internationally recognised human rights.”
It is easy to be cynical about this letter – it is after all just words, possibly prompted by a legal obligation. However, it is also possible to argue that Yahoo has genuinely turned a corner.
Former Chinese dissident Harry Wu is administering the new Yahoo human rights fund. As John O’Reilly, a leading human rights commentator, said of the letter to Rice: “This is the first time a company has been so explicit in its condemnation of human rights violations and this, together with the establishment of the new fund, is pretty ground-breaking stuff.”
It is far too early to say whether Yahoo has genuinely had a Damascene moment, or even that it has got itself off the human rights hook. However, the company’s recent actions suggest that Yahoo has seen the error of its ways and may yet be the force for good it says it wants to be.