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China: Revenue opportunities and the Internet death penalty

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China

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 27 Nov 2003 15:10 GMT

"My personal commitment to improving global health started when I learned about health inequities. I remember reading the 1993 World Development Report. Every page screamed out that human life was not being as valued in the world at large as it should be." Those were comments made by Bill Gates speaking at the U.N. Secretary General's Luncheon in 2002 about the good work done by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the organisation he set up with his wife that has so far donated around $6.3bn to mainly health-related causes since 2000.

Gates' philanthropic good deeds to date and his attitude towards needless death and inequalities in society are admirable. Only the terminally cynical mind could imagine that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is simply the softer end of the Microsoft marketing machine -- designed to add a cuddly sheen to the hard-edge corporate face of the world's most powerful software company. But it's hard not to feel cheated when a supposed technical innovator talks of "human life was not being as valued in the world at large as it should be" while signing huge software deals with China --- a country that has imposed the death sentence for some Internet-related crimes and has one of the worst human rights records in the world.

Earlier this month, Microsoft signed a deal with the state-owned China National Computer and Software & Technology Service (CS&S), the country's largest domestic software development and systems integration firm, to co-develop products based on .Net and Office Systems platforms. This latest agreement deepens the company's relationship with China, which dates back to 2002 when Microsoft began donating money to educational projects and investing in joint ventures with local companies. In August this year Timothy Chen was given the newly created position as CEO for Microsoft's greater China region -- responsible for supervising all of the company's business lines in the region.