A final note on Chinese bloggers

A few weeks back I got into a sort of blogging-in-China phase. And today, conveniently enough, as I'm in the process of typing in entries, I came across this piece from The Washington Post, which argues that it's not just Microsoft (the object of my earlier derision) but also Yahoo and Cisco and others who have sold their technological souls to do business with the Chinese government.

Anne Applebaum, the author of the Post piece, (who, ironically enough, uses a Yahoo address as her contact line) brings up the issue of whether the sorts of deals these companies are making are even legal:

If this isn't illegal, maybe it should be. After the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the United States passed a law prohibiting U.S. firms from selling "crime control and detection" equipment to the Chinese. But in 1989, the definition of police equipment ran to truncheons, handcuffs and riot gear. Has it been updated? We may soon find out: A few days ago, Rep. Dan Burton of the House Foreign Relations Committee wrote a letter to the Commerce Department asking exactly that. In any case, it's time to have this debate again. There could be other solutions -- such as flooding the Chinese Internet with filter-breaking technology.

As with many stories, I'm continually amazed this has hit bigger (for the record, I first learned about it from an AP story back in May). The blogosphere especially has been silent on the issue, aside from a few dozen people linking to the Wired story back in June, which itself was a few weeks behind the curve.

I've said it in a lot of posts before this, and I'll say it again: This is really scary stuff, and the chapters we read for class this week didn't even begin to scratch the surface. (The chapters, by the way, were published six weeks before the introduction of MSN's My Spaces to the Chinese blogosphere.)