So Twitter now has a managing
director in China - a Chinese woman who used to be in the military - and
online activists on the open side of the Great Firewall are freaking
out.
Yet it really is hard to see how concerning the appointment of Kathy Chen should actually be.
Twitter is blocked in China but is very popular with Chinese dissidents based in the West.
It
is also used by Chinese intellectuals and companies with international
links: they access the social networking site with the use of a VPN to
escape Beijing's rigorous censorship regime.
What's worried many
has been the content of Kathy Chen's initial burst of tweets, like when
she proclaimed to Chinese state television @cctvnews "let's work
together to tell great China story to the World!"
Crushing free speech?
People
asked: Why would Twitter be wanting to work together with Communist
Party controlled media? What would that co-operation entail?
She wrote that she was "thrilled to be" at Twitter to "create more
value for Chinese enterprises, creators, partners and developers".
But
some in cyberspace have not shared her enthusiasm. @badiucao wrote
"Deep worry about twitter hiring @kathychen2016 as China MD. Itz murder
of freespeech."
Apart from being an engineer in the People's
Liberation Army, some have pointed to her previous employment with the
American company Computer Associates. When it operated a joint venture
in the 1990s, China's Ministry of Public Security owned a 20% stake in
the local partner entity.
Clearly the implication is that she has
been, in some way, linked to the crushing of free speech in her
homeland - but really where is the evidence for this?
Building the Great Firewall
She
was in the military - as a lot of people in China have been. Does that
mean you can't work for social media? A previous employer had some sort
of link to the Ministry of Public Security. That doesn't mean she did
anything for them. Maybe she did but at the moment this is well short of
being established.
The world of high tech involvement in China is a murky one indeed.
Another of Ms Chen's previous employers was Cisco.
Cisco helped China's security apparatus build the Great Firewall of China.
For many online activists this clearly places Cisco in the realm of selling its soul by cashing in on Chinese oppression.
But
whatever you think about the company's activities, does the selling of
these routers to China mean that any employee of the company is tarred
with the action?
Twitter's strategy
The
appointment of Twitter's new China managing director is a money-making
exercise. She's there to sell advertising, to forge commercial links.
The company has already said publicly that it has nothing to do with any
attempt to have its site un-blocked for a quarter of the world's
population.
So far Twitter has refrained from the publicity stunts of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg
as way of trying to "get into China". He's gone jogging through the
Beijing pollution without a facemask. He assured a Chinese delegation
that his top staff were all busily reading the collected speeches of
President Xi Jinping and did a Q&A session with students here in his
best Chinese. It hasn't worked so far.
Twitter's strategy, on the
other hand, seems to be to accept their blocked status and make what
they can from it given the limitations as they are.
Enter Kathy Chen!
Irrespective of her history she'd better be buckled down for the ride ahead.
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