Koolhaas & Google in China

A familiar premise of Western culture is that the public media exist to help uphold democracy and to guarantee its openness. Sabotaging these media is considered a form of censorship. Censorship, in the sense of denial of information, is thus held to be a pre-eminent threat to the political or moral order. It is hardly surprising, in this light, that Rem Koolhaas's acceptance of a commission to design the new headquarters in Beijing for the Chinese state television company cctv, while widely applauded, meets resistance from some quarters.1 No less surprising is that Google's decision to launch a censored version of its search engine, Google.cn, is seen not only as an understandable business move but as an issue for debate.2

From what we may term a modernist critical viewpoint, Koolhaas and Google are both candidates for a 'department of lies' under whose aegis hot topics such as the Dalai Lama, Taiwan's aspirations for independence, the 1989 events on Tiananmen Square, the Falun Gong movement and Chinese human rights violations are not to be mentioned. From the same viewpoint, it is striking that Amnesty International reported as follows in early 2006, thirty years after the death of Mao: 'The human rights situation in China has deteriorated sharply over the last decade. Violations are widespread: torture and mistreatment by police and prison guards; arbitrary detention; biased courts; far-reaching restrictions on freedom of speech in all forms, especially with regard to dissidents and to religious or spiritual movements; the heavy repression of nationalistic activities and sympathies in the Tibet and Xinjiang regions. Executions take place on a wide scale, often consequence to arbitrary proceedings and/or political interference.'3

Those who are involved have other arguments, too. Google, whose slogan is 'Don't Be Evil', claims its decision to venture into China (admittedly on a path already beaten by Yahoo!, Microsoft and Cisco) was motivated by the thought that it would be even worse for the country if people lacked the facility of Googling. Google wouldn't really be deceiving the Chinese public anyway, because Google.cn would inform users with a message whenever a search action was blocked. What is more, according to Google, this would in itself have a gently subversive effect and encourage Chinese users to risk infiltrating through the Great Chinese Firewall, the nickname for the software which filters international web traffic into China and which has been designated by some as 'the most sophisticated effort of its kind in the world'. As the bbc observed, 'China is proof that the Net can be developed and strangled all at once.'4

However you look at it, Google is trying to conceal its pure market-mindedness. But what also becomes painfully clear is that people outside China, too, have surrendered en masse to a business venture which manages a lot of the wayfinding on the Internet, and which is prepared to perform censorship for commercial motives if necessary – motives which are not immediately obvious to everyone. Is this the 'Google Feeling'?5

Now, in 2006, access to bbc Chinese.com is still being blocked in China, and it seems extremely unlikely that the Communist Party's repressive control will be any less rigorous a year from now. We may well wonder what kind of conclusions Koolhaas will draw if his estimate or feeling is not borne out. Koolhaas's involvement in China is no doubt sincere, but in which China? The China which, according to Amnesty, is presently holding at least 64 cyber-dissidents in captivity? That is the Chinese digital revolution.

Still, it is interesting that defenders of Koolhaas, like those of Google, argue that the design of the medium – in this case, the cctv Building – may well have a beneficial effect when built. 'The character of the building can have a positive effect on the surroundings. It isn't a hermetically sealed box but is partly open to the public. Besides housing the state television corporation, it contains a media park, a hotel and other public amenities.'8 A heartening modernist-utopian outlook, isn't it?

It is the affirmative and rhetorical quality of the ongoing debates concerning visibility, openness and freedom of speech that itself betrays the increasing emptiness of these concepts. Their hidden, prohibited and secretive dimensions seem to be better at producing meaning and more eloquent about the contemporary condition of our culture than those things that are explicitly demonstrated, stated or depicted. The visible and ostensibly uncensored aspect has suffered inflation in a culture which has increasingly striven to reveal all, which has willingly surrendered its secrets and its privacy to the cameras and the internet.

Our society's increasing obsession with national and personal security and with public order violates more and more taboos. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben refers, for example, to a new 'normality' of the relationship between citizens and the state which has developed as a reaction to the recent security policies of the Bush administration, and in which anyone wishing to venture onto us territory must be prepared to have fingerprints or iris scans taken. Surveillance practices, which have always been rightly regarded as inhuman and exceptional, are increasingly accepted as humane, normal dimensions of life, writes Agamben, who thus holds that the politico-legal status of democratic citizens is changing and that the room for political action is shrinking. 'What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal" bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This relation no longer has anything to do with free and active participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life. These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.'9

Returning to Koolhaas and Google in China, we may wonder whether Koolhaas is being accorded the status of Mega-Author by grace of the Chinese authorities, or, on the contrary, that in designing the cctv Building he is relinquishing his authorship in a grandiloquent gesture. And is Google upgrading the state of China to Author status, or vice versa? Koolhaas and Google, like true avant-gardists, both embrace (from a post-modernist standpoint, too, but then without having to accept what used to be the unavoidable consequences) the new paradigm of censorship, and so enter into a power swap.