An American in Beijing: An Attorney's Ethical Considerations Abroad With a Client Doing Business with A Repressive Government
September 1, 2006
James B. Heffernan
When the Chinese government needed information on the e-mail address huoyan1989@ yahoo.com.cn, Yahoo! Inc.'s Hong Kong division gladly gave the authorities the information. Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist for the newspaper Contemporary Business News, used this e-mail address to disclose to a colleague in the United States that the Chinese government had warned his newspaper not to overplay the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the investigation of Mr. Shi, Yahoo provided records showing that Mr. Shi had used his computer at Contemporary Business News on the evening of April 20, 2004, to access his Yahoo e-mail account and to send an email to a New York web-site named Democracy Forum. Based on the information Yahoo provided to Chinese authorities, Mr. Shi was sentenced to ten years for "illegally providing state secrets abroad." Yahoo claimed it was just following Chinese law.
Because the court proceedings were not public, it was hard to tell to what extent Yahoo, an American corporation, complied with the Chinese authorities. It was unclear if Yahoo's actions were voluntary or provided in response to a court order. Some argue that Yahoo played a crucial role in linking the contents of the e-mail to the e-mail account holder, Mr. Shi. Others argue that Yahoo's information was only supplemental to the investigation, as the Chinese authorities already had enough on Mr. Shi to convict him. This disagreement aside, Yahoo's Hong Kong division is incorporated in Hong Kong, not in the People's Republic of China. Although Yahoo was able to do business in mainland China, like offering e-mail services as in Shi Tao's case, Yahoo may not have had a legal obligation to Chinese authorities.
Yahoo's control over e-mail sent by its customers makes Yahoo important to the Chinese government in its attempts to censor the web. ...
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by:
Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics
Summer, 2006
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