Shi Tao, Yahoo!, and the lessons for corporate social responsibility A working paper (Version 1.0 – December 30, 2007) by Rebecca MacKinnon Assistant Professor, Journalism & Media Studies Centre, University of Hong Kong e-mail:
[email protected] weblog: http://rconversation.blogs.com Corrections and comments welcome. Future revisions will be posted at: http://rconversation.blogs.com/about.html This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. (In other words: you are welcome to distribute this document to your students, friends, colleagues, whoever, as long as you attribute me as the author and don’t publish it for profit.) ABSTRACT: In 2005, Chinese journalist Shi Tao was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison for leaking state secrets abroad. Key evidence cited in Chinese court documents included information about Shi’s account supplied by Yahoo! to the Chinese State Security Bureau. Condemnation by human rights groups and investors, U.S. congressional hearings, a Hong Kong government investigation, and a U.S. lawsuit followed. This paper documents the core facts, events, issues and debates involved. The Shi Tao case highlights the complex challenges of corporate social responsibility for Internet and telecommunications companies: They are caught between demands of governments on one hand and rights of users on the other – not only in authoritarian countries such as China but in virtually all countries around the world.