It’s a rare example indeed when a Western multinational is chastised in public for putting profit before principle: They sat just two feet apart, the mother of a journalist confined to a Chinese prison and the wealthy head of the giant U.S. company that helped put him behind bars. But before Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive…
Showing all posts tagged China
No pork for you
Thanks for telling us: The organisers of the Beijing Olympics have denied that secret pig-breeding centres have been set up to ensure pork supplied to international athletes will be safe to eat. They were responding to reports that the official pork supplier for the Games had set up a dozen special breeding farms where bans…
Sorry is the hardest word
Yahoo! finally comes (nearly) clean: A top executive at Yahoo Inc. has apologized for failing to inform U.S. lawmakers about the circumstances under which the Internet company gave the Chinese government information on one of its users. Michael Callahan, executive vice president and general counsel at Yahoo, told a House Foreign Relations panel in February…
Principle before profit?
Many Western multinationals, like Google, have embraced China and chosen to comply with onerous restrictions and censorship. WordPress, a popular blogging tool, has not. Matt Mullenweg, the 23-year-old founder, explains why: We had a bigger problem in China. It set the moral compass for the company. About a quarter of our traffic was coming from…
The hunger grows
China now has 172 million Internet users and roughly four million new users going online every month. While the Chinese regime parades its new leadership to the world, change is occurring within the country far away from the 17th National Congress.
Don’t touch the Dalai Lama
The inevitable payback: American websites have come under attack in China since President George W. Bush met the Dalai Lama in Washington this week. Popular search engines are said to have been “hijacked” by computer hackers who had managed to redirect users to a Chinese website. Analysts at Search Engine Roundtable, a website focusing on…
The future is surely here
Today in China there are over 130 million internet users. Take your mind back to 1997 and the reality, according to this fascinating Wired article, was a world away: In the hype-ridden People’s Republic of China, 1996 was the “Year of the Internet.” No matter that, by the highest estimates, only 150,000 Chinese people –…
What is China doing?
An interesting discussion about the role of the internet in China and Web 2.0. Who said the West is ahead on these issues?