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This article was downloaded by: [24.9.65.78]On: 09 March 2013, At: 15:16Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Quarterly Journal of SpeechPublication details, including instructions for authors and
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Google and the Twisted Cyber Spy
Affair: USChinese Communication in
an Age of GlobalizationStephen John Hartnett
Version of record first published: 06 Oct 2011.
To cite this article: Stephen John Hartnett (2011): Google and the Twisted Cyber Spy Affair:
USChinese Communication in an Age of Globalization, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 97:4, 411-434
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.608705
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Google and the Twisted Cyber SpyAffair: US
Chinese Communication inan Age of Globalization
Stephen John Hartnett
The twisted cyber spy affair began in 2010, when Google was attacked by Chinese
cyber-warriors charged with stealing Googles intellectual property, planting viruses in its
computers, and hacking the accounts of Chinese human rights activists. In the ensuing
international embroglio, the US mainstream press, corporate leaders, and White House
deployed what I call the rhetoric of belligerent humanitarianism to try to shame the
Chinese while making a case for global free markets, unfettered speech, and emerging
democracy. That rhetorical strategy carries heavy baggage, however, as it tends to insult
the international community, exalt neo-liberal capitalism, sound paternalistic, and feel
missionary. Belligerent humanitarianism sounds prudent, however, when compared tothe rhetorical strategy of the US militaryindustrial complex, which marshals the
rhetoric of warhawk hysteria to escalate threats into crises and political questions into
armed inevitabilities. To counter these two rhetorical strategies, this essay argues that
Chinas leaders deploy the rhetoric of traumatized nationalism, wherein they merge a
biting sense of imperial victimage, Maoist tropes of heroism, and a new-found sense of
market mastery to portray the US as a tottering land of hypocrisy and China as the rising
hope for a new world order. The Twisted Cyber Spy affair therefore offers a case study
of USChinese communication in an age of globalization.
Keywords: Belligerent Humanitarianism; Warhawk Hysteria; Traumatized
Nationalism; China; Globalization
Stephen John Hartnett is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of
Colorado Denver; send comments to [email protected]. For their editorial support, thanks to my
colleagues in the Front Range Rhetoric Group, including Hamilton Bean, Greg Dickinson, Sonja Foss, Lisa
Keranen, and Brian Ott. The anonymous readers of this essay and editor McKerrow made insightful comments
for which the author is grateful. For their camaraderie while traveling in and thinking about China, thanks to
Drs. Patrick Dodge, Donovan Conley, Sonja Foss, John Sunnygard, Lisa Keranen, Barbara Walkosz, and our
friends at the International College of Beijing.
ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2011 National Communication Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.608705
Quarterly Journal of Speech
Vol. 97, No. 4, November 2011, pp. 411434
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.608705http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.608705 -
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A global controversy erupted on January 12, 2010, when David Drummond, Googles
Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and its Chief Legal Officer, posted a
statement on the Google webpage titled A New Approach to China. Drummond
announced that in mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted
attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in thetheft of intellectual property from Google. Drummond also noted that a primary
goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights
activists. Google therefore accused China of trying to steal its intellectual property,
compromising the security of its corporate infrastructure, and spying on Chinese
dissidents. In response, Google decided that we are no longer willing to continue
censoring our results on Google.cn, where searches for terms such as Dalai Lama,
Tibet, or Tiananmen Massacre produce blank screens. By naming China as the source
of the attacks, and by declaring that it would no longer comply with Chinas
censorship policies, Google implied that it might cease its operations in the worldsfastest growing Internet market, where as many as 400 million consumers log-on each
day. For global technophiles, the signal was clear: China was attacking Google in an
attempt to quash what Guobin Yang has called the Internet-fueled and democracy-
enhancing communication revolution in contemporary China. Google fed this
narrative by portraying its actions as embedded within a fight over free speech in an
age of globalization. No isolated incident, the Google affair unfolded amidst what felt
at the time to be a rapidly deteriorating relationship between the US and China; Ian
Bremmer, the political scientist and risk profiteer, thus warned that summer that the
growing list of grievances between the two powers raise[d] the specter of a new
kind of cold war.1
The Google affair demonstrates how globalization turns local questions of human
rights into international arenas of contestation and transforms nationally based
investors into share-holders of transnational corporations whose actions leap across
national boundaries and sometimes conflict with national interests. Moreover,
because the economic fates of America and China are increasingly entwined, and as
our contrasting political systems clash, so the two nations produce an escalating
stream of communication about each other, their commercial relationship, and how
their political trajectories will, in large part, shape the contours of the twenty-first
century. This accelerating exchange of goods and ideas means that those US-basedscholars who hope to contribute to conversations about US and international politics
face a remarkable opportunity: learning as much as possible about China*the
worlds most populous nation, fastest growing economy, and, arguably, one if its
most dynamic cultures*will open new doors for addressing the complexities of
globalization, the dilemmas and opportunities of international communication, and
the futures of democracy in both the US and China.
Framing the Google affair as a representative case study for probing these
questions, my analysis demonstrates how recent US-China communication has built
a dangerous pattern of misunderstanding and crisis escalation. Elite US players
deploy militaristic arguments wrapped within traditional versions of Americanexceptionalism, wherein the US is portrayed as the worlds leading economic force,
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guiding moral light, and self-appointed enforcer. This narrative depicts Americans as
be-knighted humanitarians obligated to spread enlightenment globally, hence making
them belligerent humanitarians. Unquestioned US global leadership has been so
ingrained into American thinking, Susan Shirk observes, that we have come to think
of it as our divine right. While this rhetorical pattern is so familiar to mostAmericans that it is taken for granted, this essay demonstrates how it strikes our
international neighbors as imperialistic and hypocritical, thus foreclosing the
possibility of fruitful international dialogue*particularly when this exceptionalism
veers towards crass stereotyping of others. Indeed, Robert Dreyfuss notes how quickly
American discourse about China slides, almost by habit, toward xenophobia,
racism, and Yellow Peril-style alarmism. In that same vein, leading China observer
David Shambaugh notes that this combination of racism, exceptionalism, and
paternalism amounts to a long-standing missionary complex, wherein US leaders
approach China not as an equal but as a wayward problem to be fixed. As we shallsee, while belligerent humanitarianism makes for edifying rhetoric that plays well
with many Americans, it infuriates our global neighbors.2
My analysis also demonstrates how the Chinese leadership seems uninterested in
moving past the bombastic heroism of revolutionary Maoism and is therefore
incapable of speaking in modes that do not demonize American culture and
foreshadow conflict. Communication scholars Xing Lu and Herbert Simons observed
in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2006 that in the post-Mao period of economic
and political reform, more pragmatic thinking has been promoted by the Party.
Lu and Simons argue that as China emerged from communism into a market
economy, the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP, or Party) sought to portrayits new leaders as credible players on a global scale by employing rhetoric that was
pragmatic, reconciliatory, and accommodating. This case study demonstrates,
however, that when issues of national sovereignty and global influence are at play,
such reconciliatory rhetoric recedes in the face of militant nationalism. As Evan
Medeiros of the National Security Council has observed, this resurgent nationalism
combines a strong sense of triumphalism, wherein China sees itself as a global
leader, with a lingering sense of victimization at the hands of others, hence
revealing an acute sensitivity to coercion by foreign powers. Because the CCP
repeatedly combines the wounds of that nations history as a colonial victim with anew chest-thumping bravado, I hereafter argue that its rhetoric constitutes a form of
traumatized nationalism.3
If Americas sense of exceptionalism leaves its leaders tone deaf to how their
belligerent humanitarianism insults others, Chinas traumatized nationalism renders
that nations leaders incapable of playing constructive roles on the international
scene. The worlds two most powerful nations appear, then, to have created a
rhetorical pattern that amounts, as described by former US Secretary of State
Zbigniew Brzezinski, to escalating reciprocal demonization. I should temper these
claims, however, with a dose of realpolitik, for despite the rhetorical and market
patterns noted here, China and the US have obvious interests in pursuing mutualdiplomacy regarding the management of crises in Iran, Sudan, North Korea, and
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elsewhere. Indeed, by January 2011 the two nations were literally cooing over what
US President Obama was calling the positive, constructive, cooperative USChina
relationship. As I will address in the epilogue to this essay, we may therefore be
witnessing the production of a dual strategy, where hostile rhetoric is deployed for
populist political purposes at home, in both the US and China, while the interests ofrealpolitikdrive a more measured rhetoric at the highest levels of government. And so
I proceed with the understanding that examining the Google affair in particular and
USChina communication in general stands as nothing less than an occasion for
pondering the possible fates of international solidarity, economic justice, and human
rights in an age of globalization.4
In order to pursue these claims, the essay unfolds in three steps. First, I address the
controversy regarding allegedly China-based cyber-espionage against Google; this
international imbroglio led to a series of heated charges and countercharges between
America and China, with the CCP eventually referring to the affair as part of atwisted cyber spy conspiracy launched by the US to discredit China. Second,
I examine US responses to the affair, and focus on US Secretary of State Hillary
Clintons On Internet Freedom speech of January 21, 2010, in which she made a
dynamic case for globalizing human rights and free speech while employing the
rhetoric of belligerent humanitarianism. To demonstrate the competing rhetorical
dynamics at play, I also address the claims of the USChina Economic and Security
Review Commission, which portrays China as having commenced a global war of
cyber espionage, thievery, and sabotage. Because the Commission expresses the
procurement ambitions, nationalist fervor, and threat-construction needs of the
military
industrial complex, I characterize its rhetorical strategy as illustratingwarhawk hysteria. Third, to show how the Chinese political leadership fuels the
Commissions threat mongering by pushing the rhetoric of traumatized nationalism,
I address the CCPs angry responses to Google, Clinton, and the Commission in its
mouthpiece publication, the Peoples Daily Online. The epilogue to the essay then
returns to the question of how the morality-free norms of neoliberal globalization
and the pressures ofrealpolitikcompromise calls for international human rights, free
speech, and transnational solidarity.
Google, Cyber Espionage, and the Deteriorating US
China Relationship
Following Drummonds announcement of January 12, 2010, the US media lit up with
commentary. The New York Times reported that the situation illustrated what many
cyber-observers had been saying for years: that China was engaging in vast electro-
nic spying operations targeting US military intelligence, international corporate
research, and political dissidents around the globe. The next day, White House
spokesman Nicholas Shapiro referred to recent cyber-intrusions; critics noted that
the list includes the August 2006 web-attack on the US Department of Defense, the
November 2006 targeting of the US Naval War College, the August 2007 intrusion
into the computers of the British Security Service, the French Prime Ministers office,and the German Chancellors office, the October 2007 espionage at the Oak Ridge
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National Laboratory, and the October 2008 hacking into the Skype accounts of
expatriate Chinese dissidents. In fact, computer security experts indicated that such
Chinese cyber-intrusions have targeted computers in 103 countries, amounting to a
massive, globalized campaign. These offensive actions are coupled with defensive
ones as well, for as noted by numerous China watchers, while news of the Googleattacks was ricocheting around the globes web-pages and newspapers, the story was
censored in China*Googles stand against censorship was being censored! In fact,
the Partys control of what is and is not permitted to reach Chinese web-users is
so complete that one critic refers to Chinas information pigsty. Still, web-savvy
Chinese netizens found ways to circumvent the Great Fire Wall of CCP web
censors to learn of the events; one Chinese man I spoke to snapped that as a
consequence of the Partys handling of the affair, we are really pissed off, no one
believes the Party anymore.5
To put the Google attacks in context, readers should note that the CCP has longsought to import Western technical knowledge to facilitate Chinas R&D programs,
especially as the Chinese, according to US National Public Radio, aim to build the
next Silicon Valley. The attempt to steal Googles source-code and other technical
secrets should be understood within this strategy of accelerating Chinese economic
development by pilfering decades of time and billions of dollars worth of US-based
research. Richard Clarke and Robert Knakes Cyber War, for example, paints a
devastating picture of China engaging in the theft of US intellectual property. The
secrets behind everything from pharmaceutical formulas to bioengineering designs,
to nanotechnology, to weapons systems . . . have been taken by the PLA [Peoples
Liberation Army] and private hacking groups and given to China, Inc., they warn.The theft of the fruits of Americas industrial and technical genius is so breathtaking,
Clarke and Knake opine, that it amounts to every interesting lab, company, and
research facility in the US being systematically vacuum cleaned by some foreign
entity. The Google incident therefore illustrates how our age of globalization is
underwritten by transnational competition over who authors the rules driving
corporate profits and who owns the knowledge that will drive the twenty-first
century.6
Given the high stakes involved, it was only forty-eight hours from Googles initial
announcement until the implications of the moment were brought home by NicholasKristof, the first journalist in the mainstream US press to use the phrase cyber-war.
Kristof dropped that alarming term on January 14, but whereas the term cyber-war
indicates a globalizing offensive, one of Kristofs sources saw the moment as
indicating a Chinese retreat back to provincialism. Its not Google thats with-
drawing from China, his source said, its China thats withdrawing from the world.
Whether understood as the opening of a global cyber-war or as the closing off of
Chinese relations with the Western world, Kristof remained optimistic about the
long-term, writing with classic American bravado that in a conflict between the
Communist Party and Google, the Party will win in the short run. But in the long
run, Id put my money on Google. Talks of bets could sound cavalier, however, asother reporters were noting that the attacks signal the arrival of a new kind of
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conflict. Indeed, Tom Gjelten warned NPR listeners on January 18 that the Google
affair offered a glimpse of twenty-first century cyber-warfare. Thus, from the initial
announcement of the incident on January 12 to the NPR story a week later, US
news consumers were whisked from talk of cyber-thievery, cyber-espionage, and
cyber-spying to larger questions of international trade practices and technologytransfers, ending up at that escalatory trope of cyber-war. The full damage looming
ahead was conveyed in Clarke and Knakes Cyber War, which offers this hair-raising
account of how a cyber-attack could cripple the nation within fifteen minutes,
leading to a nationwide power blackout . . . Poison gas clouds wafting toward
Washington and Houston. Refineries burning up oil supplies . . . Subways crash-
ing . . . Freight trains derailing . . . Aircraft falling out of the sky . . . The financial
system freezing . . . Weather, navigation, and communication satellites spinning out
of their orbits . . . And the US military . . . struggling to communicate between
units.
7
While the world seemed to be hurtling toward a global cyber-war that could have
devastating consequences, the White House offered a reminder of the lingering threat
of traditional shooting wars when, on the last day of January, 2010, the Obama
administration announced a $6.4 billion arms deal with Taiwan. The decision
signaled to Beijing that President Obama would continue the USs half-century-long
policy of arming the Taiwanese, hence exacerbating Chinas most proximate and
pressing foreign policy dilemma. As if to rub salt in the wound, President Obama met
on February 18 with that other thorn in the side of Chinas sovereignty: His Holiness
the Dalai Lama. While the White House observed that Tibet is a recognized part of
China, meaning no overt US support for the Free Tibet crowd, its references tohuman rights and cultural autonomy signaled US backing for some of the Dalai
Lamas goals. That double punch of American machismo*to hell with your wishes,
we will arm the Taiwanese and we will treat the Tibetans as oppressed allies*sent the
CCP a fierce reminder that the US would continue to use its military and diplomatic
powers to try to shape international affairs by curtailing Chinas foreign policy
options.8
The Google affair entered a new phase of concern when the Washington Post
reported that in order to investigate the cyber-intrusions, Google had turned for help
to the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA). The worlds largest intelligencegathering outfit, the NSA was tarred with having done much of the dirty work of the
Bush administrations post-9/11 surveillance programs. And so, as soon as the news
broke, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) posted a rebuke to Google, saying
that it is hard to imagine a more potent*or frightening*combination. The
ACLUs message noted that the NSAs primary mission is spying, and that it was the
key tool used by President George W. Bush for his vast dragnet of suspicionless
surveillance. Imagine the moment: Google and other leading technology firms were
furious at the Chinese for engaging in cyber-espionage, thievery, and surveillance; the
CCP was furious over allegations of cyber-espionage, US arms sales to Taiwan, and
US support for the Dalai Lama; the Obama administration was furious over Chineseattacks, but unable to do anything about them; and the US Left, once again
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demonizing the most basic practices of national security, was reverting to typical
anti-everything-ism to announce that instead of making good sense, a GoogleNSA
alliance amounted to a harbinger of the coming techno-fascism.9
Hillary Clintons Belligerent Humanitarianism and the Commissions
Warhawk Hysteria
Recognizing that events were escalating rapidly both at home and abroad, and hoping
to spin the crisis to the USs advantage, President Obama called upon one of his
administrations most experienced and articulate spokespersons, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, to step into the cauldron. She responded by delivering a speech that
combined heady talk of global peace with threatening imagery, thus adding further
fuel to the fire of conflict by reprising the rhetoric of belligerent humanitarianism.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was a good choice for the occasion, notonly because of her nervy confidence and command of international relations, but
also because her husband, President Bill Clinton, was among Washingtons first
advocates of forming better cyber-security defenses. From as early as 1995, when he
founded the Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (known
as the Marsh Commission), President Bill Clinton had been in the forefront of
recognizing that cyber-wars would likely be among the deciding factors of twenty-
first century global power. Hillary Clinton would certainly have been well aware of,
if not instrumental in forming, Bill Clintons thinking in this regard, meaning she
rose to the occasion in 2010 with more than a decade of experience considering how
cyber-related issues impact US security concerns. And so, on January 21, 2010, whilethe Google affair was swirling, Secretary of State Clinton stepped to the lectern to
deliver a rousing defense of international human rights and free speech. As has been
true of Clintonian rhetoric for the past two decades, her speech was laced with a
series of neoliberal tropes, chief among them the claim that Western technology
and US-led international trade inevitably make the world more democratic and
prosperous.10
Clinton began by noting that the spread of information networks is forming a
new nervous system for our planet. That nervous system has a political function,
however, as Clinton informed the world that the US stand[s] for a single Internetwhere all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. To drive home the
foundational premises justifying that claim, Clinton invoked the 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, a seminal global justice document and one of the
chief weapons of Chinese dissidents, who cite it while indicting Chinas routine
human rights violations. As if that jab was not enough, Clinton then remarked that
as I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to
erase my words from the records of history. To place such censorship in historical
perspective, Clinton noted that whereas the Berlin Wall was the defining Cold War
image of international animosity, with troops and ideals amassed behind fortified
barriers, so the new iconic infrastructure of our age is the Internet. Instead ofdivision, it stands for connection. Secretary Clinton then appropriated Winston
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Churchills famous phrase from his 1946 Sinews of Peace speech to warn that a
newinformation curtainis descending across much of the world, and that, as in the
dictatorships of the past, governments are targeting independent thinkers.11
Secretary Clintons opening comments therefore sought to accomplish four goals:
(1) to portray the US as the worlds chief upholder of the Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights; (2) to celebrate the US as the architect of the Internet Age and
therefore as the worlds leading proponent of a New World of wired equal
opportunity; (3) to depict the Chinese as engaging in rights-abrogating censorship
while supporting their Cold War-style dictatorship; and (4) to shift US fear and
loathing from the Soviets, the founders of the original Iron Curtain, to the CCP, the
Internet ages builders of a new information curtain. Considering how badly the
US has botched its Global War on Terrorism*including the now Dante-esque
catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan*it seemed as if perhaps Secretary Clinton had
been charged not only with speaking to the Google affair and its fallout, but with thelarger task of declaring a paradigm shift in US foreign policy: after eight years of the
Bush Doctrine dispatching military might in the pursuit of global US dominance,
Secretary of State Clinton was declaring that technological savvy and human rights
would be marshaled in the spread of equal access to knowledge and ideas.
No longer the epicenter of Bush-style global-war-making-in-the-name-of-peace,
Washington DC would henceforth stand for spreading technological excellence,
expanding equal opportunity, and defending human rights.
Secretary of State Clintons belligerent humanitarianism was based on a series of
assumptions about American exceptionalism: we are the worlds moral leaders, its
technological and corporate masters, and the only nation capable of and willing toenforce the rule of law. For those accustomed to such claims, the position is
obviously, even righteously beyond doubt*our leadership is, to borrow from
Thomas Jefferson, self evident. Because such claims infuriate the CCP (and others),
let us back up to consider the complicated and contested genealogy of such thinking.
The history of human rights may be traced to Thomas Jeffersons 1776 Declaration of
Independence, a noble document that invoked inalienable and self-evident natural
rights while refusing to free millions of slaves. Thomas Paine electrified the Western
world in 1791 with his blockbuster treatise, The Rights of Man; by 1797, Immanuel
Kant added an expansive spin on these ideas by arguing for international politicalright[s], what he called cosmopolitan right[s]. When the United Nations approved
the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it sought to institutionalize a new
order of international and cosmopolitan rights. It was clear at the time, however, that
most of these rights were not universally practiced and in fact were inimical to the
ruling parties of the vast majority of nation states, including, at the time, China,
India, and the USS.R., meaning that the documents universal values were not
shared by the nations that housed more than half of the planet s population. By the
late-1990s, US President Bill Clinton was ordering bombing runs in the Balkans in
the name of human rights. From one perspective, a heroic line stretches from
Jefferson to Paine to Kant to the UNs Declaration to Clintons bombings, for in eachinstance freedom of conscience and from oppression were deemed worth fighting
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for*President Clinton thus called his actions part of a just and necessary war.
If necessary, human rights will be enforced by war, for aiding the weak and extending
democracy are righteous causes.12
From a different perspective, this human rights tradition amounts to little more
than murderous humbug. During the US intervention in the Balkans, for example,Noam Chomsky compared President Clintons actions to those of imperial Japan
and fascist Germany during World War II, when those nations invasions were
accompanied by highly uplifting humanitarian rhetoric. When President George W.
Bush launched the US invasion of Iraq*in large part, he claimed, to defend the
human rights of Iraqis who suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein*the world
lurched with disgust at his crass invocations of God and peace in the cause of war.
Encapsulating global resentment at this feat of hubris, Jean Bricmont observed that
President Bush had launched a new age of humanitarian imperialism. The CCP
inhabits this perspective, as indicated by Chinas Foreign Ministry spokeswoman,Jiang Yu, who claimed that invoking human rights to influence Chinas internal
politics amounts to gross interference with Chinas sovereignty.13
When Secretary of State Clinton deployed human rights in her speech, she clearly
did so with the belief that she was embodying the Jeffersonian and Kantian tradition
wherein self-evident and inalienable rights amount to noble, universal, heroic
values. Chomsky, Bricmont, and Jiang Yu indicate, however, that this rhetorical
heritage is haunted, for how can any state advance cosmopolitan values without
trampling on the national sovereignty of other states? How can a leader invoke
universal rights without playing God? For many Americans it is self-evident that we
should help others*
it is our national calling, the foundation of our righteousness*
yet as Daniel Luban argues, this position illustrates the almost unconscious sense of
US exceptionalism that has driven the US to wage so many unjust wars in the past.
Political ethicist Seyla Benhabib notes that the question Is universalism ethno-
centric? betrays an anxiety that has haunted the West since the conquest of
the Americas. Belligerent humanitarianism, then, at least as deployed by Secretary
of State Clinton, amounts to an attempt to pursue US interests while also invok-
ing universal rights, all while trying to side-step the anxiety Benhabib notes,
counteract the militaristic hubris invoked by President Bush, celebrate the purported
wonders of neoliberal capitalism, and push the Chinese hard without crossing theline into the realm of threat mongering*it is an impossibly complicated rhetorical
task.14
Perhaps hoping to soften her belligerent humanitarian rhetoric by draping it in less
nationalist and more cosmopolitan claims, and sounding very much like her husband
during his dogged attempts to promote NAFTA in the early 1990s, Secretary Clinton
switched gears to offer a rousing defense of global free trade. Echoing one of
Thomas Friedmans claims that because of US-led neoliberal capitalism hierarchies
are being flattened and the playing field is being leveled, Clinton argued that
information networks have become a great leveler. This cheerful version of tech-
savvy free markets has become official US trade policy, as seen in US TradeRepresentative Susan Schwabs 2008 claim that extending free trade zones and fast-
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track economic development is a matter of leveling the playing field. The problem
with that claim, however, is that it tells only part of the story. For while Friedman,
Schwab, and Clinton are correct in claiming that advancing information networks
and spreading neoliberal markets have offered the lifeline of opportunity to millions
around the globe, these market trends have also tended to make the rich richer andthe poor poorer. Indeed, Mike Davis, Amy Chua, and others have demonstrated how
programs that combine the technological gismos of the New Internet Age with IMF-
imposed shock therapies, World Bank-led development projects, and US-style
debt-fueled investment strategies function not so much as levelers as multipliers of
existing wealth gaps both within developing nations and between them and G-20
economic powerhouses. One of the key components of belligerent humanitarianism,
then, is its reliance on the missionary myth of free markets, wherein the complexities
and complications of global capitalism are buried beneath an avalanche of cheerful,
even millennial proclamations about how Western-style capitalism will save theworld.15
The problem with this missionary free market rhetoric is that ever since the first
Opium War of 1839, when the British bombed the Chinese in order to force them to
open their markets to Western goods*including opium produced by that arch-
symbol of imperial mercantilism, the East India Trading Company*the Chinese have
learned that talk of free trade and human rights often amounts to a prelude to war.
Such concerns fueled revolutionary Maoism, as indicated in this passage from one of
Maos 1945 speeches, wherein he warned that the imperialists and their running
dogs, the Chinese reactionaries, will not resign themselves to defeat . . . [and] will
continue to gang up against the Chinese people. . .
by smuggl[ing] their agents intoChina to sow dissension. As if to confirm such fears, Clintons speech appears to
merge a call for universal human rights and equal opportunity with a familiar
argument in which free trade stands as the right of the West to dictate policies to the
East. President George W. Bush deployed a mode of post-9/11 rhetoric that I have
called benevolent empire, wherein he merged millennial dream-work, imperial
bravado, and grand provincialism to proclaim that the US would alter the course of
history by imposing its will upon the world. Those readers tuned to the nuances of
American rhetoric will agree that Secretary of State Clintons speech does not rise to
that level of murderous hubris; still, it falls squarely within the tradition of belligerenthumanitarianism wherein, precisely as Mao feared, imperialists and their running
dogs use Western values to flay the communists in the name of spreading human
rights and missionary notions of capitalism.16
Clinton then uncorked her most forceful punch, claiming that no nation, no
group, no individual should stay buried in the rubble of oppression. We cannot stand
by while people are separated from the human family by walls of censorship. The
devastating Haitian earthquake was still fresh in everyones minds at the time, so
rubble may have been a Haiti-inspired metaphor that slipped into her speech about
China, but anyone who has traveled around the glistening mega-developments of
Shanghai, Beijing, or Qingdao will know that most of the rubble in eastern Chinaderives from old hutongs getting pulled down to make room for more Western-style
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shopping centers, cafes, and, glitzy hotels. Western and Southern China have been hit
with earthquakes recently, so there is much quake-caused rubble in Sichuan, Yushu,
Xinjiang, and elsewhere, but Clintons use of the term seems instead to indicate
historys rubble, the discarded trash of failed regimes and toppled states. While
Secretary Clintons call to end censorship makes good sense, the CCP is neither failingnor toppling, making her rubble phrase not only inaccurate but unnecessarily
provocative. And so Secretary Clintons belligerent humanitarianism slides from a
utopian plea to move into a New Internet Age of Universal Freedom (led by the US,
of course) to wielding insulting imagery that portrays China as buried in the rubble
of oppression. Another component of belligerent humanitarianism therefore appears
to be a foundational disregard for the Other: even while trying to persuade the
Chinese, Clinton insults them; even while making a plea for global US leadership,
she illustrates the arrogance that drives much of the international community to
distraction.
17
In fact, the day after Clintons speech, Chinas Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ma
Zhaoxu, wrote on the ministrys website that we urge the US side to respect facts and
[to] stop using the so-called freedom of the Internet to make unjustified accusations
against China. An unnamed Chinese source called the speech another example of
information imperialism. The CCPs Global Times, an English-language newspaper,
reported that Clintons speech was loaded with aggressive rhetoric, and noted that
unlike advanced Western countries, Chinese society is still vulnerable to the effect of
multifarious information flowing in, especially when it is for creating disorder. This
line is revelatory, for the CCP admits here that its hold on power is so tenuous that it
cannot tolerate multifarious information from the West corrupting the minds of itsyouth. From this perspective, Google is just another Western battering ram, a weapon
for imposing information imperialism on fragile Chinese culture. If Clintons
belligerent humanitarianism interlaced neoliberal cliches about the magic of free
markets with an evangelical version of human rights and high-handed insults to the
Chinese, then the CCPs default rhetorical habits left it talking of foreign invaders,
imperial dogs, and the corrupting influence of the decadent West. In short, while
Clintons speech cheered those Americans who longed for a tough stand against
Chinese cyber-intrusions, it infuriated the CCP and left it fulminating about US-led
attacks upon its national sovereignty.
18
But the CCP was not the only force alleging foreign attacks upon national
sovereignty. For in the Autumn of 2009, a few months before the Google affair went
public in January 2010, the USChina Economic and Security Review Commission
(hereafter called the Commission) released a report titled Capability of the Peoples
Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation
(hereafter CNE Report). The CNE Report was prepared in collaboration with the
weapons contracting giant Northrop Grumman, and so arrived in Washington
packed with insider information and the sharp rhetorical tone and procurement
ambitions that mark the interests of those corporations whose profits depend upon
foreign enemies. As a host of observers have noted, firms such as NorthropGrumman, outfits like the Commission, and figures like Richard Clarke and Ian
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Bremmer rely for their livelihood on threat construction. As analyzed in Garry Wills
Bomb Power, such figures have grown rich and powerful since World War II by
sustaining a level of national security mania that amounts to a world of perpetual
emergency, a continuous state of impending or partial war that, of course, calls for
the purchase of their goods and services. It is therefore difficult when reading theCNE Report to know whether the Commission is offering the best information
available on the subject or engaging in the next round of hyper-ventilating pork-
barrel lobbying. Still, the Commission features an all-star cast of international experts
and Beltway heavies; its annual report to Congress carries such significance that upon
its release, the Commissions Vice Chairman, Dr. Larry Wortzel*long-time spy,
retired Army colonel, and leading figure at the arch-conservative Heritage
Foundation*was invited to testify before the United States Senate Subcommittee
on Terrorism and Homeland Security. In short, when the Commission speaks,
Washington listens. The Commissions 2009 CNE Reporttherefore merits attention.
19
Lest readers think that Google and Google-like cyber-intrusions are the work of
renegade hackers, the CNE Report notes that the recent cyber-intrusions indicate
actions beyond the capabilities . . . of virtually all organized cybercriminal
enterprises, meaning that they would be difficult at best without some type of
state sponsorship. Read within the context of the Google affair, that line cannot be
misunderstood: Google was attacked as part of an ongoing and accelerating global
military initiative led by the CCP. The damage that could result from such attacks,
Wortzel claimed before the US Senate, could be at the magnitude of similar effects
caused by a weapon of mass destruction [WMD]. For good measure, Wortzel also
mentioned 9/11. Those of us who remember the months leading up to the USinvasion of Iraq will know that when talk of WMD and 9/11 are combined, massive
aerial bombardments are not far behind. Thus, whereas Secretary of State Clintons
speech illustrates belligerent humanitarianism, the CNE Report practices what I call
warhawk hysteria, wherein diplomacy, negotiation, and dialogue are effaced beneath a
barrage of militaristic threats meant to collapse the distinction between peace-time
cyber espionage and war-time cyber attacks.20
As if such WMD and 9/11 comparisons were not alarming enough, the CNE Report
notes that peace-time computer intrusions of the Google affair variety are tests for
what will become war-time actions, for the skill sets needed to penetrate a networkfor intelligence gathering purposes in peacetime are the same skills necessary to
penetrate that network for offensive action during wartime. While the prose used in
making that claim is measured, the lines consequences may be called hysterical, for
they imply that the everyday mechanics of advanced computer activity*program
testing, code breaking, grid mapping, network analysis, and so on*are also forms of
war. Even more alarming given US concerns about terrorism, the CNE Reportargues
that the PLA may employ the tools of Information Warfare not to win a struggle
between China and the US but to create windows of opportunity for other forces to
operate without detection. Thus playing upon Global War on Terrorism anxieties,
the Commission threatens a possible partnership between the PLA and Al Qaeda orother rogue forces.21
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The CNE Report therefore makes a strong case that the US is already undergoing
multiple forms of cyber-assault and cyber-thievery, that terrorist alliances with the
CCP are possible, and that WMD-like consequences lurk around the corner.
And so, as Secretary Clinton was wielding the trope of belligerent humanitarianism
to try to influence the CCP and sway global public opinion, the Commission and itsmilitary and corporate allies were deploying warhawk hysteria to portray US techno-
warriors battling Chinese cyber-spies behind the scenes. US leaders should realize,
then, that President Obamas and Secretary of State Clintons belligerent humanitar-
ianism sounds like a lie in the face of the CNE Reports warhawk hysteria, for while
the one rhetorical habit offers a paternalistic olive branch, the other describes an
already-commenced war. And so there should be no surprise to learn that the Chinese
leadership was both confused and angered during the winter and spring of 2010.
Indeed, as we shall below, the confusing combination of belligerent humanitarianism
and warhawk hysteria*
when salted with high-level US talks with the Dalai Lama andarms sales to Taiwan*exacerbated the sense of victimization that drives the CCPs
version of traumatized nationalism.
The Peoples Daily Online and the Rhetoric of Traumatized Nationalism
Historically, the Peoples Daily Online (hereafter PDO) has been the mouthpiece of
the Central Committee of the CCP, as described by Guoguang Wu, who worked as
an editor at the paper in the mid-1980s. Based on his experience with the PDO, Wu
observes that the paper provides unquestioned representations of the will of the
leadership. In fact, because the function of the PDOis not to enable informed debatebut to tell Chinese readers exactly what the Party wants them to think, Wu argues that
it illustrates command communication, wherein the paper functions as a set of
orders from above. As part of the CCPs efforts to modernize its messaging, the PDO
went on-line in 1997 and is now translated into English, French, Spanish, Russian,
Japanese, and Arabic, with a rumored global readership of between three and four
million. Along with the China Daily and the just-launched CNC World*the global
television news agency that is run by the Party, based in New York City, and modeled
on Al Jazeera*the PDO stands among the CCPs main efforts to reach a global
audience and hence amounts to an important artifact for studying the CCPs versionof traumatized nationalism. The PDO is deeply distrusted in China, where citizens
snicker that nothing is true in the paper except the date; I approach it, then, not as
an indicator of popular sentiment in China but as evidence of the rhetorical habits of
the Party.22
Understanding the recent manifestations of traumatized nationalism begins by
framing the CCPs long-standing wariness of Western communication technologies,
for as communication scholar Jason Abbott notes, ever since banned images of the
Tiananmen Square massacre ricocheted through the Stanford University-based
ChinaNet newsgroup in 1989, conservatives within the Communist Party feared
that the Internet represented a technology that was simply a weapon of USdomination. With prominent dissidents like Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei saying
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things like the Internet is Gods gift to China, the CCP has good reason to fear the
free flow of information. To watch how the Party tries to render this fear in terms that
sustain its purposes, I turn below to the six major themes that, taken together,
amount to a rhetoric of traumatized nationalism. I suggest that studying the PDOs
response to the Google affair offers us glimpses into the contemporary Chinesepolitical scene and, at a deeper level, into some of the key structuring narratives of
post-Mao China, including contested versions of Chinese national history, identity,
and destiny.23
Tropes I
III: The Entwined Roles of Imperial Victim, Maoist Hero, and Shrewd
Capitalist
In one posting from February, 2010, the CCP revealed that Chinas information
network, especially that part run by the military, has always remained a victim ofhackers attacks from overseas. In March, the CCP acknowledged that the website of
the Ministry of National Defense (MOD, the equivalent of the US Pentagon)
receives thousands of overseas-based hacking attacks every day, amounting to
more than 2.3 million attacks by hackers within its first month of operation. The
CCP reported that these attacks were traced to servers in Australia, Singapore, Japan,
and Canada, with the most attacks, almost seventeen percent of them, coming from
the US. Deploying the trope of China-as-Victim at the hands of Imperial Invaders
would obviously resonate with a people trained to think of the period stretching from
roughly 1839 (the first disastrous Opium War) to 1949 (the victorious launching of
the PRC) as a Century of Humiliation. Indeed, the trope of China-as-Victim isrooted in centuries of hard history wherein Russia and then the USSR, India, Tibet,
Mongolia, Portugal, Britain, Germany, the US, and Japan have all at some point
sacked Chinese cultural treasures, stolen Chinese resources, enslaved Chinese
laborers, and planted their flags on Chinese soil. Following the 1989 massacre in
Tiananmen Square, for example, Beijings mayor, Chen Xitong, argued that crushing
the students and workers was justified because their counterrevolutionary rebellion
was sponsored by political forces in the West who colluded with Chinese
traitors to try to subvert the PRC and leave China enslaved to the rule of
international monopoly capital. From this perspective, the Party must be ever-vigilant against Western attempts to (re)turn China into a colonial victim. Indeed,
given the deeply grained sense of shame and fear woven into this history of imperial
victimhood, and given the obvious need to lay blame for past blunders at the feet of
the West rather than at botched Communist rule, there can be little wonder that
many Chinese leaders speak of the past century as an age of Western-imposed
trauma.24
But invoking the trope of China-as-Victim also reveals vulnerability, a sin for a
dictatorship based in large part on maintaining a series of heroic narratives meant to
guarantee the Partys legitimacy. Thus, if the first major strand of the CCPs response
to the Google affair was to declare its victimhood at the hands of imperial dogs, thenits second thread would need to counter that sense of vulnerability by celebrating
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Maoist Heroism. The traumatic past will be transcended via militant nationalism. For
example, in China in 2010 and Beyond, Christopher Williams*one of a handful of
nonChinese contributors used by the PDO to justify the Partys positions*noted
that whereas democracy in America is bogged down in all the usual ways, China has
a unique advantage in that decisions can be made and acted upon with a speed, andclarity of purpose, that the USA cannot match. All that congressional bickering and
public dialogue, what a nuisance! For Williams, China is situated to act heroically
because Dictators Dont Dither*the CCP may be the victim of cyber attacks, but it
will respond decisively, heroically, with proper Maoist clarity and purpose. Indeed,
even in postmodern China, the CCP relies upon the traditional trope of Maoist-
Triumph-Over-Evil, as witnessed in the CCP declaring that through its handling of
the Google case, the Chinese government has successfully defended itself in an
ideological battle. Chinese websites may be hacked regularly, and Google and then
Clinton may have handled the CCP with typical imperialist arrogance, but the CCPassures its readers that the Party will, as ever, emerge triumphant. This narrative of
Maoist Heroism, especially when offered in the context of the Google affair, dovetails
nicely with the half-century-long belief among the CCPs leaders that Chinese
scientists, and especially those scientists dedicated to weapons technology and other
advanced forms of R&D, will inevitably enable China to leapfrog past the US into a
position of market leadership and military dominance. In an age of globalization and
Internet proliferation, then, the trope of Maoist Heroism emerges via what Richard
Suttmeier calls Chinas techno-nationalism.25
The problem with invoking this trope of the heroic and decisive Party is that
multinationals will only invest in those dictatorships that can promise a stronglikelihood of profits*capital seeks neither democracy nor nationalists but a friendly
investment environment. The CCP therefore tempers its heroic narrative of decisive
Party action with reminders that China is indeed a post-national investor s paradise.
Traumatic nationalism will be tempered, then, by the homogenizing force of global
capital. The Party thus noted in Foreign Firms are Welcome in China that
according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, China is
the most attractive destination for foreign investment in 2010. Given the emergence
of robust labor union activism in China during the Spring of 2010, and considering
the threat of continuing censorship, some Western firms may find such claimsfraught with complications. Still, it is intriguing to watch the CCP try to craft a
subject position that is part imperial victim, part heroic dictatorship, and part
capitalist play-land. In fact, the CCP proudly announces that it can win ideological
battles and become rich at the same time, as this article trumpets the news that since
Googles partial pullout, its main Chinese competitor, Baidu, has seen its stock soar
upwards by 40 percent, reaching the dizzying price of $579.72 per share. In the New
China, Maoist narratives of ideological triumph are thus merged with heady stock
prices. The examples offered here indicate how the CCP responded to the Google
affair by trying to merge three tropes: China as Victim, China as Maoist Land of
Heroic Triumph, and China as Capitalist Dream. Traumatic nationalism is morelikely to succeed as a rhetorical strategy, however, if it also posits an Evil Other against
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whom to rally; hence the PDO paired its celebrations of the New China with three
stinging claims regarding the US.26
Tropes IV
VI: The Entwined Tropes of US Error, Hypocrisy, and PropagandaWhereas the first three tropes within the Peoples Daily Onlines response to the
Google affair point to the deep narrative structure of Chinas traumatic nationalism,
the second set of tropes indicates how the CCP views the US* the image portrayed
here is damning. Indeed, this second set of tropes aligns in a causal chain where step 1
shows the US as a factory of factual error; step 2 then demonstrates how American
thinking is so factually wrong because it is driven by a series of self-contradictions
that amount to a national disease of hypocrisy; step 3 then argues that the
combination of error and hypocrisy can be explained by the propaganda needs of the
US Empire, which strives to blanket the world with lies. The opacity of Party dealingsmakes it difficult to know whether or to what extent the CCP leadership believes any
of these charges, yet it is instructive to notice how heavily the Partys version of
traumatic nationalism relies on attacking Evil Others, as if China national honor can
only be praised in comparison to craven US machinations.
The trope of the US as a land of error infuses almost every article I studied from
the Peoples Daily Online, and is most evident in Google Totally Wrong, where each
use of the world wrong is accompanied by the adjective totally*Americans are
not only in error, but in deep philosophical error. Other articles switched from the
totally wrong mantra to calling US representations of the case groundless,
twisted, and sheer nonsense. US responses to the situation are so error-prone,however, not simply because Americans lack the facts, but because our perpetual state
of self-denial is so deep that we are habitual hypocrites. In contrast to US error and
hypocrisy, China is portrayed as a space of moral clarity, a realm cleansed of any
doubt or complexity. In making this claim, the Peoples Daily Online echoes the
rhetorical certainty of Mao and his adherents, for whom the Partys officially
sanctioned correct line was juxtaposed against notions that were wrong, in error,
needing forced re-education and often punishment. Writing in the PDO in 1948, for
example, Chairman Mao warned his readers to adhere to the right line and right
policies of the Party. When student activists began advocating for increaseddemocratic rights in the Summer of 1986, Deng Xiaoping argued that people who
confuse right and wrong, who turn black into white . . . cant be allowed to go around
with impunity stirring the masses up to make trouble. Opening Chinese culture to
Western-style debate and argumentation, what Deng calls the threat of bourgeois
liberalization, would plunge the country into turmoil. Speaking in 2007, Politburo
member Luo Gan reminded the world that Chinas judges were not beholden to the
law but to the Party: The correct political stand, he warned, is where the Party
stands. Recalling this Maoist tradition of upholding a non-negotiable distinction
between right-and-wrong, correct-and-subversive, the Party and everyone else, helps
us make sense of the CCPs spinning the Google affair as yet another example ofAmerican Error.27
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The deeper psychological underpinnings of American Error can be traced, so the
CCP argues, to our standing as the worlds champions of hypocrisy. For example,
while Americans bask in the glow of their wealth and privilege, the CCP charges that
quite a few people in the US are disappointed and jealous about Chinas rise.
Because we Americans are envious of Chinas increasing wealth and power, weunfairly hold it to what the CCP calls a double standard: while US sources accuse
the Chinese of repressing free speech on the Internet, so the Internet is also
restricted in the US, when it comes to information concerning terrorism, porn, racial
discrimination, and other threats to society. Because the US hypocritically takes a
strict line with other countries, but not with itself, the CCP concludes that it is
quite hypocritical. The fact that the CCP equates its censoring of Tibetan websites, or
arresting the authors of Charter 08, or forbidding free debate about Taiwan with
terrorism and porn tells us how deeply the CCP fears for its own legitimacy.
Indeed, the argument that the US censoring pedophilic pornography websites is thesame as the CCP censoring information about the fate of Buddhist monks in Lhasa
indicates what can only be called rhetorical desperation on the part of the Party.28
Readers should recall, however, that ever since Mao began his rise to power in the
1940s, the CCP has sought to justify its actions, even the most brutal ones, as
necessary responses to the plots of outside forces and internal traitors. I have already
offered quotations from Mao, Deng, and Chen to illustrate this rhetorical habit and
to demonstrate how multiple generations of Party leaders believed that they must
engage in extreme responses to counter the ever-present US propaganda machine.
Embodying that heritage, the PDO argued in 2010 that the Party must strike back
against its enemies because the US media is committed to discredit[ing] China andsupporting the US war machine. In China Rejects US Cyber Warfare Allegations,
the CCP announces that US claims about the causes underlying the Google pullout
are fabrications. The US war machine is using Google to act tough, alleges
another article, thus echoing the Partys charges that US coverage of the case is
fabricated with a hidden agenda and calculated to achieve hype out of ulterior
motives. The Partys rhetoric in these passages is so bombastic that it veers at times
toward the comic, yet those of us who have studied how the American mass media
caved in during the Bush administrations march to war in Iraq will also recall how
numerous reporters were played by the Bush White House to serve as its mouthpiecesfor conveying fabricated intelligence and outlandish fears. And so, even while the
CCPs attack on the USs alleged war machine propaganda feels fanciful, who can
blame the Party*and the millions of international readers of the PDO*for learning
from recent experience to doubt the honesty of much of the US corporate mass
media?29
Chinas traumatic nationalism therefore contains two interlocking parts: tropes
IIII offer insights into how the CCP thinks about China*they are the victims
of imperialism but also heroic Maoists and market-beating capitalists*while tropes
IV-VI illustrate how the CCP thinks about America*we are steeped in factual error,
driven by hypocrisy, and peddlers of war machine propaganda. To contain thedamage spawned by US propaganda while harnessing the Internets potential
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for Chinese purposes, the CCP proposes that each Internet site should appoint a
Web Spokesman, a Web Master who can release the authoritative and correct
information needed to use the Internet to reassure the public and keep order.
Instead of US-style web-cacophony, the Party envisions its teams of Web Spokes-
men as continually publish[ing] news to guide public opinion and deal withevents effectively. In short, the CCP wants to co-opt the Internet to become a more
technologically-savvy tool for Party control. According to the PDO, this task will
be accomplished via the Propaganda Division of the Internet Bureau of the News
Office of the State Council. While Chairman Mao would approve of this plan to
harness the Internet in the name of command communication, readers will find
solace in learning that just about every Chinese person I have spoken to smirks when
I mention the Propaganda Division of the Internet Bureau of the News Office of the
State Council. To them, its all bad bureaucratic bungling.30
Epilogue: Google, China, and the Balance of Financial Terror
Let me close this essay by returning to the questions of Google, globalization, and the
possible fates of our relationship with China. When the allegations of cyber-
intrusions were first announced in January 2010, Google appeared to be pondering
leaving China; the Internet giant then announced that Chinese users of its search
engine would automatically be redirected from their Chinese browsers to the Google
browser offered in Hong Kong, where there is no censorship. This was unacceptable
to the CCP, which threatened to force Google to abandon not only its search engine
functions in China but also its other lucrative dealings (such as selling songdownloads, translation programs, and mobile phone services). Google then
countered the threat with an offer that was accepted by the CCP: instead of
automatically sending Chinese browsers to Hong Kong, Google created a new landing
page where users could access the old (and censored) google.cn search engine or, by
clicking on a button, they could redirect themselves to google.com.hk and seek
unfiltered information. The catch, of course, is that while the .hk site shows the usual
plethora of choices, once users try to access that material, any information the Party
does not want entering China is blocked anyway. Still, as one observer noted, the new
arrangement means that Google is no longer the enforcer of censorship*
China is.In summary, Google returned to business as usual, albeit without the stain of
enforcing CCP censorship, while Chinese web users remain stuck with a one-
dimensional world controlled by the Party and its Maoist version of command
communication.31
In the face of the CCPs commitment to command communication and
censorship, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clintons speech appears even more
important, for as the Obama administrations National Security Strategy of the
United Statesnotes of Americas evolving relationship with China, we will not agree
on every issue, but we will be candid on our human rights concerns*and to her
credit, Clinton was brusquely candid. The question, of course, is whether beingcandid and deploying belligerent humanitarianism will produce transformations in
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global human rights. As communication scholar Leonard Hawes observes, instead of
resolving disputes . . . rights-based arguments more often than not escalate
antagonisms. If the critics of this Obama/Clinton/human rights strategy are correct,
then the rhetorical pattern of belligerent humanitarianism will not only not produce
the desired effects in China but will leave the notion of human rights in acompromised position wherein it is perceived by certain parties as little more
than cover for Western imperialism. Skeptics will further argue that belligerent
humanitarianism is particularly vacuous when deployed by the same parties who
seem beholden to neoliberal market forces and who support water-boarding, the
rendition of alleged terrorists, and other human rights violations perpetuated in the
name of defending US democracy.32
While American hypocrisy and Chinese censorship stand among the most
powerful impediments to advancing international discourse about human rights, a
third key factor is the bulldozer force of global capitalism. One financial observerpredicts that with its business dealings renewed in China, Googles online advertising
in the PRC could net the company between $5 and $6 billion annually, proving that
the giants of neoliberal capitalism and authoritarian regimes can walk happily hand-
in-hand. The fact that Googles spring quarter 2010 revenue of $6.82 billion and
profits of $1.84 billion were received by. market analysts as below expectations*
despite indicating 24 percent increases over the spring quarter 2009!*suggests not
only that investors are impatient but that the companys future success depends in
part on opening new markets. This means that Google and other transnational
corporations will continue to feel intense pressure to partner with non-democratic
states: in an age of globalization, the laws of international capitalism trump candidconcerns over human rights. And so, since the Summer of 2010, when similar
questions about censorship, new media technologies, emerging markets, and the
limits of human rights flared in India, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain, no US
companies have pulled out of these states, and the White House has issued no
statements about their compromised political systems. Instead, President Obama has
announced deals with China amounting to $45 billion. And so the global market
marches on: democracy, free speech, and human rights be damned.33
Moreover, given the fact that China now owns trillions of dollars worth of US
Treasury notes, federal bonds, and other American market investments, the CCP andthe US appear to be wedded in a dance of financial dependence. Should either nation
act too irrationally, it would destroy the economies of both players, amounting to
what Lawrence Summers, former Director of the White Houses National Economic
Council, calls our balance of financial terror. The champions of globalizing
neoliberalism and belligerent humanitarianism would have us believe that that
complicated dance will eventually meander into the neighborhood of democracy.
Critics of the missionary myth of free markets would have us believe instead that that
strange embrace will lead the lucky few into swanky post-national bistros while
consigning billions to lives of poverty. Google and other technophiles would have us
believe that the Internet will somehow prod the CCP toward opening up the flow ofideas and information. And the practitioners of warhawk hysteria, both in the US and
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China, would have us believe that the competition underlying that dance will lead
inevitably to war, either of the shooting, hacking, or combined variations.34
As I have shown here, if we hope to avoid that warhawk scenario, forge a better
relationship between China and the US, and help build a more equitable version of
globalization, then we will need to re-envision our rhetorical habits. I have thus triedto demonstrate how the Partys traumatized nationalism produces an especially toxic
version of victimage, heroism, and market triumphalism, while the USs belligerent
humanitarianism rankles those uneager to be treated as wayward adolescents needing
a lecture. The question, of course, is whether the market forces that drive neoliberal
globalization and the military forces that drive warhawk hysteria will encourage,
tolerate, or stifle any significant shift in political arrangements. Nonetheless, as the
twenty-first century unfolds, these questions will become even more pressing, for
Venezuela, Mexico, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and others will almost
certainly try to counter the USs belligerent humanitarianism and warhawk hysteriawith their own versions of traumatized nationalism, hence creating rhetorical
situations that will demand prudence and creativity. Indeed, the future of global
democracy hinges, in part, on how effectively we communication scholars can help
our leaders, both in China and the US, handle such rhetorical occasions by moving
from anger to prudence, from arrogance to humility, from a slavish devotion to
wealth to fulfilling human needs, and from nationalist myth-making to cosmopolitan
dialogue.
Notes
[1] Drummonds posting is accessible at http://googleblog.blogspot.com; Guobin Yang, The
Power of the Internet in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 213; Ian
Bremmer, Gathering Storm: America and China in 2020, World Affairs, July/August 2010,
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org.
[2] Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 267; Robert
Dreyfuss, China in the Drivers Seat, The Nation, September 2, 2010, http://www.thenation.
com; for an example of such threat-mongering, see Bill Gertz, The China Threat: How the
Peoples Republic Targets America (New York: Regency, 2000); David Shambaugh, A New
China Requires a New US Strategy, Current History 109 (2010): 21926, quotation
from 219.
[3] Xing Lu and Herbert Simons, Transitional Rhetoric of Chinese Communist Party Leaders in
the Post-Mao Reform Period: Dilemmas and Strategies, Quarterly Journal of Speech 92
(2006): 26286, quotations from 264 and 278; Evan Medeiros, Is Beijing Ready for Global
Leadership? Current History 108 (2009): 25056, quotations from 250 and 251.
[4] Zbigniew Brzezinski, How to Stay Friends with China, New York Times, January 3, 2011,
A19; President Barak Obama, comments at the January 19, 2001 press conference with
Chinas President Hu Jintao, posted by the White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov.
[5] Andrew Jacobs and Miguel Helft, Google May End China Operation Over Censorship,
New York Times, January 13, 2010; Shapiros quotation and following information from
Miguel Helft and John Markoff, In Googles Rebuke of China, Focus Falls on Cyber-
Security, New York Times, January 14, 2010; on the censoring of the story, see Andrew
Jacobs, Googles Threat Echoed Everywhere, Except China, New York Times, January 14,
2010; Jiao Guobiao, Chinas Information Pigsty, China Rights Forum (2005, no. 3): 8597;
430 S. J. Hartnett
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org./http://www.thenation.com/http://www.thenation.com/http://www.whitehouse.gov./http://www.whitehouse.gov./http://www.thenation.com/http://www.thenation.com/http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org./http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ -
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to protect their safety, the names of all Chinese interlocutors quoted herein are blinded; on
netizens, see Jiyeon Kang, Coming to Terms with Unreasonable Global Power: The 2002
South Korean Candlelight Vigils, Communication and Critical Cultural Studies 6 (2009):
17192.
[6] Marilyn Geewax, China Aims to Build the Next Silicon Valley, National Public Radio,
13 June, 2010, transcript downloaded from http://www.npr.org; Richard Clarke and Robert
Knake, Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What To Do About It (New York:
HarperCollins, 2010), 59, 126; on technology transfers, see Sylvia Pfeifer, Overseas Defense
Clients Get Tougher, Financial Times, June 11, 2010; for a contrasting view, wherein the
Chinese are surging ahead in developing green technologies, see Evan Osnos, Green Giant:
Beijings Crash Program for Clean Energy, The New Yorker, December 21, 2009, http://www.
newyorker.com.
[7] Nicholas Kristoff, Google Takes a Stand, New York Times, January 14, 2010; conflict from
David Sanger and John Markoff, In Wake of Googles Loud Stance on China, Silence from
US, New York Times, January 15, 2010; Gjelten quoted in Robert Siegel, Chinese Attack on
Google Seen as Cybertheft, NPRs All Things Considered, January 18, 2010, http://www.npr.
org; Clarke and Knake, Cyber War, 67, note that I have altered the prose for purposes of
clarity.
[8] Helene Cooper, US Arms for Taiwan Send Beijing a Message, New York Times, February 1,
2010; His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama at the White House, February 18, 2010, http://
www.whitehouse.gov; on the USs confused treatment of Tibet, see Melvyn C. Goldstein, The
Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997).
[9] Ellen Nakashima, Google to Enlist NSA to Ward Off Attacks, Washington Post, February 4,
2010; ACLU web-message to members, February 9, 2010, entitled Tell Google: No Deal with
the NSA; for the CCPs response, see Zhang Xiaojun, Googles Team-Up with Spy Agency
Dangerous, Xinhua News Agency, February 25, 2010, www.xinghuanet.com/english2010/.
[10] On the Marsh Commission, see Clarke and Knake, Cyber War, 106 ff. While much attention
has been paid to Clinton as a candidate, and to Clinton as a bellwether of the status of
women in US politics, little rhetorical attention has been given to her exemplary service as
Secretary of State; for an example of this ongoing oversite, see Janis L. Edwards, The 2008
Gendered Campaign and the Problem with Hillary Studies, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 14
(2011): 15568.
[11] Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Remarks on Internet Freedom, January 21,
2010, speech at the Washington D.C. Newseum, quotations from pages 1, 2, and 3 of the
transcript, emphasis added, www.state.gov; see the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights,
http://www.un.org.
[12] On Jeffersons Declaration, see Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jeffersons Declaration of
Independence (New York: Vintage, 1978); Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man(1791), repr., The
Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 201364; Immanuel
Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), repr., Kants Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 13175, quotations from 137; President
William Jefferson Clinton, A Just and Necessary War, speech reprinted in the New York
Times, May 23, 1990; for an overview, see Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History
(New York: Norton, 2007).
[13] Noam Chomsky, The Current Bombings: Behind the Rhetoric, posted to ZNet (March
1999), http://www.chomsky.info; Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human
Rights to Sell War (New York: Monthly Review, 2007); Jiang Yu quoted in Most Nations
Oppose Peace Prize to Liu, China Daily, December 10, 2010, Chinadaily.com.cn; for
background to this critique, see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 84119.
Google and the Twisted Cyber Spy Affair 431
http://www.npr.org/http://www.newyorker.com./http://www.newyorker.com./http://www.npr.org/http://www.npr.org/http://www.whitehouse.gov/http://www.whitehouse.gov/http://www.xinghuanet.com/english2010/http://www.state.gov/http://www.un.org./http://www.chomsky.info/http://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_7/Chinadaily.com.cnhttp://localhost/var/www/apps/conversion/tmp/scratch_7/Chinadaily.com.cnhttp://www.chomsky.info/http://www.un.org./http://www.state.gov/http://www.xinghuanet.com/english2010/http://www.whitehouse.gov/http://www.whitehouse.gov/http://www.npr.org/http://www.npr.org/http://www.newyorker.com./http://www.newyorker.com./http://www.npr.org/ -
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[14] Daniel Luban, When the Good Fight is Anything But, Inter-Press Services, August 2, 2007,
http://ipsnews.net; Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the
Global Era(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 24; on the consequences of this
dilemma for international aid workers, see Fabrice Weissman, Military Humanitarianism:
A Deadly Confusion, posted on June 11, 2004 by Medecins Sans Frontieres, http://www.msf.
org, and Rod Norland, Killings in Afghan Aid Efforts Stir a Debate on US Strategy, New
York Times, December 14, 2010.
[15] Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 44; Clinton, Remarks, 4; Schwabs 7 April 2008 claim,
from a press briefing, is cited in Lies, Damn Lies, and Export Statistics (Washington, DC:
Public Citizens Global Trade Watch, 2010), 6; for critiques of this position, see Mike Davis,
Planet of Slums, New Left Review 26 (March/April 2004): 534; Amy Chua, World on
Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability
(New York: Anchor, 2004); and Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim,
Globalization and Empire: The US Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of
Democracy(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 139211.
[16] On the rhetoric of benevolent empire, see Stephen John Hartnett, War Rhetorics: The
National Security Strategy of the United Statesand President Bushs Rhetoric of Globalization-
Through-Benevolent-Empire, The South Atlantic Quarterly 105 (2006): 175206; Mao Tse-
Tungs On the Chungking Negotiations, 17 October 1945, as excerpted in his Little Red
Book, formally titled Quotations from Chairman Mao(Beijing: CCP, 2010 bilingual edition),
137; on the Opium Wars, see W. Travis Hanes and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars: The
Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another (Sourcebooks, 2004).
[17] Clinton, Remarks, 4, 6, 7; the Sichuan quake of 2008 killed as many as 70,000 Chinese and
left between five and ten million homeless (see Jake Hooker, Toll Rises in China Quake,
New York Times, May 26, 2008, www.nytimes.com); on the Yushu quake, see Tania Branigan
and James Meikle, Earthquake in China Leaves Hundreds Dead, The Guardian, April 14,
2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk.
[18] The first two quotations are from the Associated Press, China Warns US Over Clintons
Criticism, as posted at MSNBC.Com, January 22, 2010; the Global Timess lines were
reported by Christopher Bodeen, China: Clinton Internet Speech Harms Ties with US,
Associated Press, January 22, 2010, http://news.yahoo.com; and see Michael Wines, China
Issues Sharp Rebuke to US, New York Times, January 26, 2010.
[19] Bryan Krekel, George Bakos, and Christopher Barnett, Capability of the Peoples Republic of
China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation (Washington, DC: US
China Economic and Security Review Commission/Northrop Grumman, 2009), 6, 8; Garry
Wills, Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (New York:
Penguin, 2010), 1, 2; Larry M. Wortzel, Preventing Terrorist Attacks, Countering Cyber
Intrusions, and Protecting Privacy in Cyberspace, testimony before the US Senate
Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security, November 17, 2009; the CNE Report
and Wortzels testimony are both accessible via the Commissions website, http://www.uscc.
gov; on threat construction, see Stephen John Hartnett and Greg Goodale, The Demise of
Democratic Deliberation: The Defense Science Board, The MilitaryIndustrial Complex, and
The Production of Imperial Propaganda, in Rhetoric and Democracy: Pedagogical and
Political Practices, ed. David Timmerman and Todd McDorman (East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 2008), 181224, and Lisa B. Keranen, Bio(In)Security: Rhetoric,
Scientists, and Citizens in the Age of Bioterrorism, in Sizing Up Rhetoric, ed. David Zarefsky
and Elizabeth Benacka (Long Grove, IL: Waveland, 2008), 22749.
[20] CNE Report, 8; Wortzel, Preventing Terrorist Attacks, 5, 6; on the toxic combination of
WMD rhetoric and invocations of 9/11, see Hartnett and Stengrim, Globalization and
Empire, 4083; for a critique of this form of threat construction, see Daniel Fromson,
432 S. J. Hartnett
http://ipsnews.net/http://www.msf.org/http://www.msf.org/http://www.nytimes.com/http://www.guardian.co.uk./http://news.yahoo.com/http://www.uscc.gov/http://www.uscc.gov/http://www.uscc.gov/http://www.uscc.gov/http://news.yahoo.com/http://www.guardian.co.uk./http://www.nytimes.com/http://www.msf.org/http://www.msf.org/http://ipsnews.net/ -
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Weapons of Mass Distraction: Object Lessons from Cybermythology, Harpers Magazine,
September 2010, 5456.
[21] CNE Report, 8, 15, 21, emphasis added; and see Seymour Hersh, The Online Threat: Should
We Be Worried about a Cyber War? The New Yorker, November 1, 2010, 4455.
[22] Guoguang Wu, Command Communication: The Politics of Editorial Formulation in the
Peoples Daily, China Quarterly 137 (1994): 194211, quotations from 195; global
audience and CNC World information from David Barboza, China Puts Best Face
Forward in New English-Language Channel, New York Times, July 2, 2010; for background,
see Geoffrey Taubman, A Not-So World Wide Web: The Internet, China, and the Challenges
to Nondemocratic Rule, Political Communication15 (1998): 25572; the closing quotation
was provided by an anonymous reviewer for this journal and has been confirmed in my own
conversations with Chinese citizens.
[23] Jason Abbott, [email protected]? the Challenges to the Emancipatory Potential of
the Net: Lessons from China and Malaysia, Third World Quarterly 22 (2001): 99114,
quotation from 100; and see Fengshu Liu, The Norm of the Good Netizen and the
Construction of the Proper Wired Self: The Case of Chinese Urban Youth, New Media &Society (Online First edition, 4 May 2010), http://nms.sagepub.com; see Liu Xiaobo, The
Internet is Gods Present to China, The Times (London), 28 April, 2009, and Ai Weiwei, as
quoted in Ron Gluckman, The Art of Social Advocacy, Wall Street Journal, January 25,
2011, http://online.wsj.com.
[24] Linking Hackers Cyber Attacks with Chinese Government, Military Groundless, Peoples
Daily Online, February 25, 2010 *please note that all Peoples Daily Online stories cited
herein are archived at http://english.people.com.cn; Chinese Official Defense Website Still
Under Intense Attack, Peoples Daily Online, March 17, 2010; Chen Xitong, Report on
Checking the Turmoil and Quelling the Counterrevolutionary Rebellion, speech of June 30,
1989, repr., The China Reader: The Reform Era, ed. Orville Schell and David Shambaugh
(New York: Vintage, 1999), 79
95, quotations from 79, 80.[25] Christopher Williams, China in 2010 and Beyond, Peoples Daily Online, March 8, 2010;
Google Totally Wrong, Peoples Daily Online, March 24, 2010; Richard P. Suttmeier,
Chinas Techno-Warriors, Another View, China Quarterly 179 (2004): 80410, quotation
from 804.
[26] Foreign Firms are Welcome in China, Peoples Daily Online, April 6, 2010; on Chinas
merging capitalism with totalitarianism, see Kellee S. Tsai, Capitalism Without Democracy:
The Private Sector in Contemporary China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007); on labor
unrest, see Keith Bradsher, An Independent Labor Movement Stirs in China, New York
Times, June 11, 2010.
[27] Google Totally Wrong, Peoples Daily Online, March 24, 2010; groundless from China
Refutes Hacking Accusations, Peoples Daily Online, April 6, 2010; twisted from OfficialFires Back at US, Peoples Daily Online, 24 November 2009; nonsense from China Blasts
Accusations of Govt. Involvement, Peoples Daily Online, February 10, 2010; Maos 1948
PDO comment as quoted in Wu, Command Communication, 204; Deng Xiaoping,
Taking a Clear-Cut Stand Against Bourgeois Liberalization, speech of December 30, 1986,
as reprinted in Schell and Shambaugh, China Reader, 18285, quotations from 182, 183, 184;