You have to love sometimes the rhetoric of freedom fighters. The US had Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale. More recently, China has university professor Guo Quan, who, after being deleted from Google’s index at the behest of the government, called Google “a servile Pekinese dog wagging its tail at the heels of the Chinese communists.”
Ooh. I love it when people get all revolutionary.
Guo’s revolution includes building a strong democratic dissent in China via an underground party known as the New People’s Party (not to be confused with the New Party of the People or the Party of the New People, the heretics). His dissent hasn’t found him jailed, just demoted at work, and every mention of his name behind the Great Firewall erased by Google and Yahoo.
Guo is not going to take his demotion and his digital overthrow quietly, though; he’s filing a lawsuit against both companies. He can’t file suit against Google and Yahoo in China because “they have no formal legal identity,” kind of like the Lakota Nation.
Instead, Guo will be filing in the United States, where this type of thing is generally frowned upon—usually. It’s hard to say if his lawsuit has a shot, as Google and Yahoo have both defended their actions in China as obeying the laws of the country they’re doing business in.
Ned Nederlander leans in and whispers: Tell us we will die like dogs.
El Guapo: What?
Ned: Tell us we will die like dogs.
El Guapo: You will die like dogs.
Dusty Bottoms, shouting: No, we will not die like dogs! We will fight like lions.
–from the classic comedy “The Three Amigos”
But Congress probably isn’t going to like it. McCain’s was mad enough last time this issue came up to make an entire statement about it, and once he’s back in the Senate full time you can bet he’s going to say more about it then, too.
Actually do something, though? Congress? Well, we’ll see.
