Mixed Messages from Microsoft on China

Microsoft has, from time to time in its history, been compared to a many-headed dragon. This week, at least two of those heads were speaking simultaneously, though the messages they were delivering were completely contradictory with one another on a critical issue, and corporate sources are apparently still working to reconcile the opposing messages.

On Monday, at the start of an innovation summit being held in Beijing, Microsoft announced it was following up on its expanded investments in that country by licensing what it described as key technologies to two important Chinese start-up firms, Comtech Group and Hunan Talkweb. Dancing very carefully around the topic, and avoiding use of the dreaded abbreviation "DRM," Microsoft described this technology as an intellectual property protection system being developed at its Asia research facility.

Microsoft has been promising to reward China and Chinese companies for their efforts to thwart software piracy, which the company noted in its quarterly report last week. In late September, Microsoft China CEO Chen Yongzheng announced his parent company would invest an additional $100 million in China over the next five years, in addition to the $65 million it had already invested in the country just this year alone.

Meanwhile, on the very same day, but in a completely different hemisphere the parent company's senior policy counsel and director for international development policy, Fred Tipson, at the start of a different conference altogether -- the Internet Governance Forum in Athens, Greece -- conveyed his company's threat to pull out of China altogether if it didn't change its policies toward the treatment of bloggers and online journalists.

The BBC, whose reporters attended the Athens conference, quoted Tipson as emphatically and undeniably opposed to recent convictions of pro-democracy bloggers in China. "Things are getting bad," he said, "and perhaps we have to look again at our presence there."

Last week, a Chinese court pronounced its latest sentence upon a pro-democracy blogger and journalist, this time Li Jianping: three years' imprisonment for "incitement to subvert state power." It's generally well-known that the issue of whether to grant prisoners access to the Internet is not a problem in China, where prison officials are probably not struggling with the question of whether to restrict prisoners' access to even more fundamental things.

The Associated Press cited Microsoft's Tipson as adding the following: "It is a point at which point you decide the Chinese people are worse off for having this service in their country...We have to discuss at what point censorship or persecution of bloggers has reached a point, or monitoring e-mail has reached a point...where it's simply unacceptable to continue to do business there. We try to define those levels and the trends are not good at the moment. And not just in China."

Tipson was reportedly being grilled by reporters and other questioners about allegations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International, that producers of Chinese search engines such as Microsoft were actively colluding with the Chinese government to propagate that country's policy of censorship to its own citizens. He denied Microsoft was in any such collusion, arguing that instead, Microsoft's efforts there are actively increasing citizens' access to information, although he conceded any company that does business in China must abide by its own local laws.

Yet in distinguishing his company's own stance on human rights issues from that of the country where its business is expanding at the fastest rate, Tipson may have gone so far as to imply that an expansion of the political culture in China, empowered by citizens' access to information via the Internet, may inevitably lead to a change of political power there.

Although Tipson did put a cap on that implication by saying, according to the BBC, that it would be a mistake to assume the Internet in itself is a threat to any government.

For its part, the Chinese government -- who sent a representative to the Athens conference -- put forth the now tired message that there are no state restrictions whatsoever, and that his country enjoys perfect freedom of speech, just like everywhere else. As for this notion of journalists being convicted, that's probably also a fantasy, on the part of people who choose to look at China the wrong way.

"Some people say that there are journalists in China that have been arrested," the International Herald-Tribune quotes Yang Xiaokun, a representative of his government, as saying. "We have hundreds of journalists in China. Very few have been arrested. But there are criminals in all societies and we have to arrest them. But these are legal problems. It has nothing to do with freedom of expression."

Next: Behind the bluster from both ends