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Search Engine ART PINE Art Pine 833 words 8 February 2010

For years, U.S. policymakers have generally left human rights issues on the back burner in dealing with China. The rationale has been that Beijing's autocrats eventually would become more democratic once China grew prosperous and developed a more sophisticated middle class. Economic liberalization inevitably would beget political liberalization.

Former President George W. Bush kept human rights issues for private talks with the Chinese, eschewing provocative public pronouncements. President Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, obligingly averted human rights issues during her first trip to China a year ago, indicating she didn't want to jeopardize cooperation on broader issues.

Now Washington and Beijing have suddenly become embroiled in what might be their biggest human rights squabble in decades -- the confrontation between China and Google. Ironically, the spat involves both democratic values and commercial interests. And it's getting front-burner attention from U.S. officials.

Barely a week after the spat broke, Clinton seized on it to declare unrestricted access to the Internet -- and protection against cyberattacks -- a top U.S. foreign policy priority. "Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society ... pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society," she said.

The Google controversy has drawn unaccustomed attention beyond what the usual kinds of human rights abuses, such as the beating of dissidents, usually garner. U.S. companies have warned they may re-evaluate doing business in China unless the cyberhacking stops. Google has asked the National Security Agency to help track it down.

James Mann, the journalist-turned-scholar who examined the human-rights tradeoff in a 2007 book, "The China Fantasy," says the latest controversy -- in which Google charged that China abused its search engine to monitor dissidents abroad -- provides a rare confluence of human rights and business issues.

"The assumption that several past administrations have operated on was questionable from the start," Mann says. "China has shown that you can have a different model in which you can trade extensively with the outside world and also maintain tight political repression at home."

Google complained Beijing has required it to censor the content of its search engine in China, has stolen intellectual property and has permitted cyberhacking of computers used by human rights activists -- not only inside China, but in other countries. It says the cyberattacks also have penetrated the computer systems of 30 big companies.

Google and Beijing have negotiated a settlement of sorts over the company's initial complaints, and Google has indicated that it will not pull out of China, as it had hinted it might a few days ago. But the broader problem seems unlikely to go away soon.

Derek Scissors, a China-watcher at the Heritage Foundation, says China's propensity for interfering with Internet communications "still is a human rights problem and a big one," with no indication so far that it will be resolved.

"There's no place for this to go," Scissors asserts. "The Chinese are not going to give the U.S. a throwaway concession. The only thing that will change is that we'll raise the issue further. It's going to be an ongoing irritant."

Indeed, the Google affair -- along with China's increasingly tough attitude toward Washington since the start of the recession -- has helped harden the response by both sides to the sort of recurring disputes both governments previously have let pass after a few days of official harrumphing.

After the United States approved another arms sale to Taiwan last month, China threatened to retaliate against U.S. companies that manufactured the weapons. After previous such sales, the Chinese merely complained loudly and canceled scheduled exchange-visits among top military officers.

Beijing also has been more strident than usual over Obama's plan to meet with the Dalai Lama soon, after having declined to see him last autumn for fear of angering the Chinese. The Tibetan spiritual leader is scheduled to come to Washington this month, and Obama is expected to see him.

Also uncertain is how much, if any, the flap over Google might affect China's decision on whether to help persuade Iran to limit its development of nuclear weapons -- a tack the United States has been pressing China to take since Beijing has close ties with Tehran. China traditionally has rejected calls to support such prodding.

As for the longtime hope that China's becoming more prosperous would make it more liberal on human rights, the flap between China and Google hasn't proven the optimists correct, says veteran China-watcher Minxin Pei, director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College in California.

Indeed, the headlines have been filled in recent weeks with reports of continued human rights abuses in China involving the treatment of dissidents and the handling of complaints by minority groups.

"China is bigger, but not rich enough," Pei says. "Expections often may be reasonable, but not grounded in political realities."