Silicon Valley doesn't care about China

The New York Times Nov. 4 edition has a story titled, "Silicon Valley loves--and fears--China." But I say they don't care about China at all. All they care about is money.

The NYT article itself is a case in point. Take a sentence like this:

Yet Silicon Valley's views of investment in China have tended to swing between wild optimism and deep anxiety - with the anxiety going beyond a fear of losing money.

What would be more important than losing money, you ask? Well, it's certainly not political freedom, the environment, or freedom of religion. Rather, the article goes on to explain what Silicon Valley really cares about: losing their place as the preeminent technology hotspot. Not a single word in the entire article about how companies like Google and Yahoo regularly scrape their foreheads kowtowing to the Chinese Communist government at the expense of political dissidents, nor about how companies like Cisco specially configure equipment to be used to filter Chinese cyberspace (of things like Blogger, Flickr, Wikipedia, or anything else useful). Not a word about how all this new-found wealth in China is only tightening the control of the CCP rather than weakening it, as once thought. It appears that increasingly affluent Chinese are only too happy to be willfully ignorant, or too busy making more money to demand greater political freedom.

Now, I should clarify that I am not one to advocate government-to-government trade restrictions. Rather, I expect American companies to step up to the plate themselves and at least think twice when dealing in China. Silicon Valley should not view China as just a growing market or source of cheap labor. Instead, with the Chinese people in mind, they should refuse to be co-opted by the government there. Greater involvement by American companies in China could result in greater freedoms for Chinese people, but not if the only thing American companies care about is money--and that's all they apparently care about right now.