What's really at stake in Google vs. China

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Fareed Zakaria says Google's dispute with China isn't just a business matter
• He says it raises the question of China's strong constraints on flow of information
• Zakaria says China is showing signs of turning inward
• He says it would be a negative if fastest-growing economy became more insular

Editor's note: Fareed Zakaria is an author and foreign affairs analyst who hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN U.S. on Sundays at 1 and 5 p.m. ET and CNN International 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. CET / 5 p.m. Abu Dhabi / 9 p.m. HK

New York (CNN) -- Google's threat to shut down its operations in China might seem like just a dispute between a private company and a government, but the implications are huge for the world's fastest-growing economy, for the United States and for global relations, says analyst Fareed Zakaria.

With the dispute in the background, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Thursday the U.S. is committed to freedom of speech online and to freedom from the fear of cyber-attacks.

The Google-China dispute surfaced January 12 when the search engine company said it and other companies were the target of cyber-attacks originating in China aimed at gaining access to the e-mail of Chinese advocates for human rights.

Google announced that it is no longer willing to comply with China's requirements that it censor the results of searches in that country. The State Department has told China it is concerned about the issue.

Zakaria, author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria: GPS" spoke to CNN Wednesday.

CNN: What's the dispute between Google and China all about?

Fareed Zakaria: At one level, the dispute is about one company and the difficulty it's having doing business in China, but it's really a much broader issue. It's about two things really. The first is the tension between China's drive for modernity and its attempt to control information.

China has very successfully modernized over the last few decades, but it places unique limits on information. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, told me that China is the only country in the world where they had to basically sign up for a censorship regime.

The second issue: Is China turning inward? Is it beginning to believe it needs the world less than it has in the past few decades? That would have very profound consequences both for China-US relations and for the world.

CNN: What gives you the feeling that China might be turning inward?

Zakaria: It's not just the problems they've had with Google. Over the last few years, there's been the rise in China of what the Chinese call "The new right," a group of people, fairly influential in the establishment, who argue that China should be more aggressive toward the West, more aggressive toward America, that it doesn't need the U.S. as much as it did. There is also the reality that China's economy, as it has grown, is becoming large enough that China doesn't depend as much on the rest of the world for exports. It has accumulated huge surpluses of capital.

All of this is producing a China that is more parochial, more inward-looking and potentially more adversarial in its relationships with the West. If you look at the way it handled the Copenhagen summit, it's really quite striking.

The Chinese are usually protocol-obsessed. And here they had a situation where Obama wanted to meet with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese leader who was there. Now Obama technically outranks Wen Jiabao because he is a head of state. Wen Jiabao is the premier, the prime minister. Ordinarily that would mean that Wen Jiabao would go to see Obama. The reverse happened and Obama attended the meetings. Chinese officials scolded him. All of this is very unusual.

CNN: In a sense Google is raising a broader issue than the immediate issue they uncovered. They uncovered evidence that there was hacking of their sites and those of other American companies. But rather than deal with the hacking issue, they brought up the whole issue of having to have a filtered search engine in China. They're saying they're no longer willing to do that. So what's their real motivation?

Zakaria: Having spoken to Eric Schmidt for years about this, they were always uncomfortable with the system of censorship they had to sign up to in China. But they believed at the end of the day that it was a huge market, and they could do well and it could help open up information in China.

I think they came to the conclusion that China has such an elaborate apparatus of censorship but also an elaborate apparatus of cyber-warfare or cyberattack. They were really not able to have that broader beneficial effect.

Let's remember that China doesn't only have what's called the great firewall of China, the filtering and censoring system. They also have a very aggressive system of cyber-spying and cyberattack, probably the most sophisticated in the world. I should point out there are people who say Google did this because they weren't doing well in China, that they had lost market share to Baidu, a local Web search engine.

Baidu is definitely the leader, but it doesn't make any sense to quit a market because you're not the market leader. By the way, Google is not dominant in other countries and they still participate. I take them at face value, that this was a decision prompted by values. You wouldn't give up whatever percent of the world's fastest-growing market for no rhyme or reason.

They clearly were uncomfortable with this tension between their mission -- which they see as widening access to information everywhere all the time -- and China's very elaborate set of constraints on information.

By the way there's a national security component for this for the United States and other countries. Cyber-spying is clearly an effort by the Chinese to move into the information age and adopt a kind of asymmetrical warfare. China is not matching the U.S. military, ship for ship, but if it develops a very sophisticated capability to destroy command and control systems, computer systems, that's a very potent weapon in any kind of conflict, military or otherwise.

CNN: Getting back to Google's motivation, you do take their "Don't be evil" motto at face value?

Zakaria: I don't know if I take it in all places and at all times, but I do believe in this case they were motivated largely by the sense that they were undermining their values and their mission. I recognize that were this to have been churning out billions of dollars in revenue, they might not have done it. But I don't think you can make the case that there was a business motivation for this. This will clearly cost them revenue, it may not cost them a huge amount of revenue, but it will cost them.

CNN: How do we know that the hacking is being done by the Chinese government rather than by individual hackers on their own?

Zakaria: We don't know that for sure. In fact, Eric Schmidt was clear to me about that. The nature of the hacking, the coordinated elements of it, the targets, all suggest that it is something that is being done at the very least with the acquiescence or encouragement of the state. There are very few experts I've talked to who doubt that much of this has the backing of the Chinese government, but to be clear it's very difficult to tell, and there's no conclusive proof.

CNN: All of this suggests that the U.S. government has a lot at stake, and yet they don't seem to have been on the frontlines of this issue. It's a private company dealing with the Chinese government, not a government-to-government issue.

Zakaria: That's right. Washington is treading very cautiously into this, and I think correctly because this is really a dispute between China and a private company in America. The U.S. government should watch it with great interest and concern, and they should come out in favor of certain broad principles, but I don't think the U.S. government should be out there trying to open up the market for Google.

CNN: On the national security side, should the government be more active?

Zakaria: It's trying to figure out how to respond to this kind of attack, but I gather there is a fairly sustained effort now in the government. Obama has made this a top priority.

CNN: What's at stake for other American businesses that want to serve the Chinese market?

Zakaria: I think a lot is at stake, because what we're basically talking about is China's orientation, China's belief that it has to accept a global system and an open global economy, that it benefits from having foreign companies participate on an equal footing.

The more China turns inward, the more difficult it will be for American companies to find equal footing in China. The Chinese are making it increasingly clear they want to have national champions. Avatar opened in China to great success and two weeks later they basically shut it down [except for 3-D showings] and said that the movie theaters had to make way for a biopic about Confucius, and more importantly keep theaters free for Chinese-made movies.

CNN: So what can the United States do about it?

Zakaria: Washington should try to have a really sustained strategic dialogue with China, but also with our other allies, with the European countries, with Japan, and create a kind of common front for openness and greater engagement with the global system.

One of the things that has helped the global system enormously is that it had two hegemons, two global superpowers -- first Britain and then the United States -- that were very outward-oriented and shared universal values and similar conceptions of a global system, open liberal values, an open economy, a common understanding of what would make for a good global system.

If China as the great rising power turns out to be much more insular, parochial in its orientation, that would mean a much less stable, much less open world order. Think about the period of American isolationism when the United States was the rising power and it turned inward in the 1920s and 1930s. It was not good for the world.

CNN: Can the Chinese government continue to limit expression of political views as its economy grows and the Web becomes an ever more important medium of communication worldwide?

Zakaria: That's the trillion-dollar question. So far China has been remarkably successful at maintaining a system that has embraced markets, but also maintained a very controlled political system.

My own view is that that cannot last forever, but that China is still in the early stages of modernization, and it is quite possible that it will be able to continue doing this for several decades. But I think it's very difficult to imagine China being a truly innovative country at the cutting edge of the information age, of global economics, if it has all these constraints on information, all this political control on human-to-human contact, which is what the next wave of the information age is all about.

Ultimately the question is: Can China be a world leader that is admired, imitated and that shapes the global system and global values? There I have my doubts that an insular, inward-looking China that maintains tight political control over information and human contact will end up being the country that becomes the model for the world.

Haiti's Agony: What It Will Take to Rebuild

A woman stands atop what may have been a grocery store. Haiti now faces food and water shortages

Tragedy has a way of visiting those who can bear it least. Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, a place where malnutrition is widespread and less than half the population has access to clean drinking water. At 4:53:09 p.m. on Jan. 12, at a point 15 miles southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince, the Caribbean tectonic plate pushed against the neighboring North American plate along a line known as the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault system. On the earth's surface, the enormous energy created by that tremor — an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale — tossed the car that Bob Poff, the Salvation Army's director of disaster services in Haiti, was driving down the hill from the suburb of Pétionville to Port-au-Prince "to and fro like a toy." When the shaking stopped, Poff wrote on a Salvation Army blog, "I looked out of the windows to see buildings 'pancaking' down ... Thousands of people poured into the streets, crying, carrying bloody bodies, looking for anyone who could help them."

Within the next few hours, the scale of the worst earthquake to hit Haiti in more than 200 years became apparent. Just as cell-phone video cameras brought the horrors of the Indian Ocean tsunami to the world in real time five years ago, so Twitter feeds and blog posts did the same for the Haiti earthquake, reporting on what had happened, asking if anyone had heard from loved ones, calling for medical supplies and Creole speakers. Louise Ivers, clinical director for Haiti for the NGO Partners in Health, wrote, "Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. SOS. SOS ... Please help us." Ian Rodgers of Save the Children posted, "We could hear buildings still crumbling down five hours after the earthquake." (See pictures of the Haiti quake's aftermath.)

A day later, the death toll was unknown and — as is always the case with earthquakes, which bury their victims — unknowable. But more than one Haitian official told news organizations that they thought the final count of the dead would be more than 100,000. The next day, Vincenzo Pugliese, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Haiti, summed up what was known thus far. The earthquake, he said, had caused major damage, destroying the National Palace, the main cathedral and many government offices. Hotels, hospitals, schools and the capital's main prison had all been wrecked. "Casualties, which are vast," Pugliese said, "can only be estimated. Tens if not hundreds of thousands have suffered varying degrees of destruction to their homes." A nation that was already on its knees had been knocked to the ground.

Making a Tough Place Worse
The quake was not unexpected — but then, the tragedy of earthquakes is that none of them are. The world's fault lines, those dangerous boundaries between the slabs that make up the earth's crust, are well mapped. Haiti, a nation of 9 million people, sits atop the junction of the Caribbean and North American plates, which "are shearing the island, crushing it, grinding it," says Michael Blanpied, an associate coordinator for the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) earthquake-hazards program. "And as that occurs, earthquakes pop off." (See where the next five big earthquakes will be.)

That they do. Historians reckon that there have been about a dozen massive earthquakes in the Caribbean over the past 500 years. The damage they can do is well understood; in 1692, a quake caused Port Royal, Jamaica, to disappear under the Caribbean Sea, where it lies to this day. But knowing that a quake will happen one day is of little use to those who want to know if it will happen tomorrow or next week or next year. An intense, high-tech exercise in the 1980s by the USGS and the state of California to study a particularly unstable stretch of the San Andreas Fault provided absolutely no telltale signs of a quake that hit in 2004. "Earthquake prediction," says Blanpied, "if it can be done at all, is very difficult."

The Haiti earthquake was not just unusually powerful for the region; it was also shallow — a fact that, combined with the soft ground and corrugated, muddy hills around Port-au-Prince, made its impact even worse. In the city itself, sturdy buildings like the cathedral and the National Palace could not withstand the tremor, which meant that many hastily constructed concrete structures collapsed like houses of cards, killing many — the Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, for one. (Read "Seismologist Roger Musson: Haiti Quake Was the 'Big One'.")

Many of the city's finest buildings helped give Haitians their sense of identity and history — now the country must not only figure out how to recover but also try to rebuild its sense of self. Just as what happened on Jan. 12 was shaped by Haiti's unique topography and geology, so the final toll, too, will be determined by the nation's very special conditions. Haiti is an unlucky, star-crossed country. Once a slave colony of France, the world's first free black modern nation was born in blood more than 200 years ago, in a long and bitter war of independence. In the years since then, Haiti has suffered almost constantly from local misrule, foreign intervention and economic exploitation. Haiti was occupied by U.S. forces from 1915 to '34, and then from 1957 to '86 it was ruled by François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude — Papa Doc and Baby Doc — whose corruption and repression crippled the nation and led to wide-scale emigration among its educated classes.

In 1994 the U.S. intervened to force out a military regime that had ousted the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a charismatic priest who had been elected President in 1990. After a decade of political disorder, Aristide, by then in his second term as President, was forced into exile in 2004; since then, Minustah, a U.N. peacekeeping mission, has been in place — the latest in a long series of outside forces that have attempted to help Haitians establish peace and a measure of security.

What makes the earthquake especially "cruel and incomprehensible," as U.S. President Barack Obama put it, was that it struck at a rare moment of optimism. After decades of natural and political catastrophes, the U.N. peacekeeping force and an international investment campaign headed by former President Bill Clinton, the U.N.'s special envoy to Haiti, had recently begun to calm and rebuild the nation. But the mood of cautious optimism had not yet begun to improve the basic living conditions of ordinary Haitians. For even on its best day, Haiti is a public-health disaster. No Haitian city has a public sewage system; nearly 200,000 people live with HIV or AIDS, and just half of Haitian children are vaccinated against basic diseases like diphtheria and measles.

The quake will make things unimaginably worse. While emergency-response teams have already begun combing through the wreckage, searching for injured who might still be saved, there are ominous longer-term health risks that threaten the island. "In the weeks to come, we may have huge issues with public health," says Pino Annunziata, who is coordinating the emergency response for the World Health Organization in Geneva. Less than a day after the disaster, U.S. Navy and Coast Guard vessels were swarming toward Haiti, ready to spearhead disaster-relief efforts. Up to 2,000 Marines were told to be ready to head there. They will all be needed. In the first confused day after the quake, reports stressed the absence of heavy machinery to shift rubble and shore up buildings; people were scrabbling with their bare hands in the rubble for their loved ones. The U.S. military will aim to make sure airports and seaports are primed to receive the flood of aid that will soon flow in.

As always in the developing world, the first priority will be clean water. With drinking-water distribution systems destroyed — and survivors crammed into camps without sanitation — water supplies could quickly become contaminated. That could lead to rapidly spreading waterborne diseases like cholera and dysentery that can sweep through refugee camps.

With adequate aid, however, the worst might be averted. The world now rarely sees major outbreaks of infectious disease in the wake of disasters. Even in the case of the 2004 tsunami, which killed more than 200,000 people, a rapid and thorough response headed off what could have been a huge postdisaster death toll. Indeed, the sheer amount of international attention on Haiti might ultimately improve its public-health system — as occurred in the Indonesian province of Aceh after the tsunami.

All who wish Haiti well will hope for such a benign dispensation. Many will do more than hope. In a Twitter feed, Troy Livesay, one of the many missionaries who first brought word from Port-au-Prince, described the mood the night after the quake. "Church groups are singing ... in prayer," he wrote. "It is a beautiful sound in the middle of a horrible tragedy."

You don't have to be a believer to hope that the prayers of those Haitians who have long borne sorrows not of their making are answered.

— With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, Michael Scherer and Mark Thompson / Washington, Gilbert Cruz, Jeffrey Kluger, Kate Pickert and Bryan Walsh / New York and Tim Padgett / Miami

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