China. Google. Who—apart from Google, perhaps—didn’t see this coming? The West turns a blind eye to human rights abuses by the world’s biggest, most corrupt and censorious regime in the pursuit of money, offering up the most appalling compromises and actively engaging in complicity with the Chinese government’s efforts to control what its citizens can see and read. What a surprise—not—that the Chinese are now revealed to have been waging cyberwar against Western nations for some time, using hackers to try to unearth information on our security and their own dissidents.

When a British citizen was executed by the Chinese state recently, all our government was willing to do was to say how unhappy it was. No sanctions. China, the argument goes, is too powerful in economic and military terms to make a declared enemy of. And yet we have always been the enemies of the Chinese communist government from its own perspective, that much is clear, and China seeks power over the world not with the use of force—it’s too busy applying batons and firing guns at its own citizens, and those of Tibet—but by economic means.

It’s telling that the death of one British man counts for little but when the world’s biggest search engine decides to stop censoring its output in China and threatens to pull out of the country, we see President Obama and Hillary Clinton scurrying to make public pronouncements about China’s wrongdoing, demanding explanation and action. This isn’t about human rights. It’s about business. They cannot pretend to be shocked by the Chinese government sticking its fingers where they don’t belong because the Chinese government is paranoid, totalitarian and violently repressive. It cannot change without being overthrown by its own people. As this is unlikely to happen, we in the West have always had a simple choice: do business with these people, or don’t.

If we don’t do business with them, the theory goes, the country and its leaders come under ever-increasing pressure from within as people clamour for the things they are being denied—freedom of speech, press freedom, freedom to be who you want, say what you want, without fear of being murdered in the night or locked away in a cell forever without a fair trial.

A long time ago when Google first decided to censor its search results in China I wrote on this blog a post now archived and no longer publicly available, about how this made a mockery of the company’s slogan ‘Don’t Be Evil’. Yahoo! entered the Chinese market and fairly quickly handed over information on dissidents at the request of Chinese authorities, as if it had no choice in the matter when it most definitely did have a choice. These two search giants are not the only companies to have bent over willingly to be China’s bitches but Google’s late-to-the-table display of corporate courage—always a rare thing—may just be the spark that lights a fire to create a bonfire of the contemptible vanities that rank profit higher in importance than human rights as if the two are antiethical to one another.

How long now before Yahoo! tells the world it is following in Google’s footsteps and exiting China? Tellingly, Google’s share price fell yesterday—because morality, among traders, has no place interfering with business. Google should be applauded by those of us who are still human for finally, after four years of extensive damage to its reputation, doing the right thing. Still, we have confirmation (yet again) that in the 21st Century it is big business that affects change and not our democratically elected leaders in the West.

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• Exactly Right, Google. Exactly Right (technologizer.com)
• Google to Reasses Relationship With China (abcnews.go.com)
• Google’s new approach to China (advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org)
• Google will quit China unless web censorship ends (telegraph.co.uk)
• US asks China to explain Google hacking attack claims (guardian.co.uk)

Amina and Ridwan Shaikh, relatives of Akmal Shaikh who was executed by China this week, have written a public letter in which they accuse the British government of hypocrisy in its dealings with China. They also condemn the UK media with the “exception of Sky News” for drawing attention to Akmal’s plight only as his execution drew near and not many months before, which might have allowed for greater and more sustained political and public pressure against the Chinese.

The media’s failure to draw attention sooner to Shaikh’s plight reveals the subjective ‘entertainment’ status of contemporary news reporting. It should make anyone of good character somewhat queasy to think that such a terrible prospect as the imminent killing of a British citizen by the Chinese was ignored for a very long time.

As individuals we can boycott Chinese goods and visits to the country itself, if we believe a boycott to be an appropriate and necessary response, but our leaders will never countenance sanctions against China. This refusal to act is yet another way in which our politicians are exposed as fraudsters and liars.

The British government has made clear there will be no formal diplomatic retaliation beyond criticism. It’s as likely to encourage change as Lady Gaga is likely to turn up on stage covered up wearing a duffle coat, preaching celibacy.

The Spicy Cauldron, in common with millions of other Western websites, is banned in China. I’m that scary, apparently. And of course I’m subversive to the core. But it’s a lot more scary to me when our government fails to defend a fellow citizen against a corrupt and paranoid regime abroad, and allows him to be killed.

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• You: Britain ‘abandoned’ Akmal Shaikh (guardian.co.uk)
• Letters: Anger at the execution of Akmal Shaikh (guardian.co.uk)
• Execution of Akmal Shaikh: China warns Britain the bilateral relationship is at risk (telegraph.co.uk)