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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

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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,

412 S. J. Hartnett


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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

Google and the Twisted Cyber Spy Affair 413


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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

414 S. J. Hartnett


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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



7/25

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

416 S. J. Hartnett


8/25

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

418 S. J. Hartnett


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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

420 S. J. Hartnett


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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



13/25

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

422 S. J. Hartnett


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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

424 S. J. Hartnett


16/25

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



17/25

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

426 S. J. Hartnett


18/25

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

428 S. J. Hartnett


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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.

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;

china google

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