US - China Tension Heightened over Internet Freedom Issues

The start of the new decade marks a new world order, and greater strains in Sino-US ties. Yesterday just saw a raise in tensions over the issue of internet freedom after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Mr Maoxu, a foreign ministry spokesman stated yesterday in a rebuttal on the ministry's website that the criticism levelled by Hillary Clinton was "harmful to Sino-US relations". He stressed that the "Chinese internet is open".

The debate was brought to the fore in China last week when Google announced it will shut down its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, and curtail its other its other operations in China if Chinese officials did not back from requiring Google to censor its search results.

Until now, Google had been trying to frame this dispute with Google as purely a commercial matter, and took great effort to explain that these should not be "over-interpreted" and linked to the bilateral relations between China and U.S.

But in the aftermath of Ms Clinton's speech, in my opinion, this attitude could be changing. In her speech, Ms Hillary Clinton took little care to adopt a sensitive and tactful manner when addressing the issue. She pointedly said that a "new information curtain was descending across much of the world" and bluntly identified China as one of the handful of countries that have stepped up on their internet censorship.

Ms Clinton's provocative speech has raised the stakes of a possible clash between Beijing and Washington over their different point of views on the issue of internet freedom.

It is a foregone conclusion that China's complicated censorship, nicknamed the "Great Firewall" is a ineffective tool. A wall can be scaled, similarly, there are external proxy servers that can bypass the censorship imposed.

In light of this fact, I think China shouldn't persist on its ideal of censorship, and further damage Sino-US ties. After all, it is not working...