Laws and rights differ from country to country, and just because your company doesn’t agree with the country’s laws and rights, doesn’t mean that you can just ignore the local authorities (especially when it means that your company can be closed down) .

To top that off, see what has happened?

Consider this, let’s say that an Arab businessman is suing a major US phone company in his local country, for allowing the FBI to (illegally?) tap all of his personal phone calls while he was in the US. In this case, the phone company would say that they were legally obliged to help the FBI, yet the businessman feels that it is a gross intrusion on his privacy. Should the local phone company be held responsible for what its subsidiary did in the US?

While I do not sympathize with China and many of it’s policies of covering its rear end at the expense of the people who live in the country, I do understand that if you plan to do business in China, you must follow their rules, no matter how stupid they may be appear to be. And from my experience with business China, I know that the Chinese government will try anything to gain control of a profitable foreign company, to put it under state rule.

For example, a Chinese friend of mine (American 3rd generation)had a town factory in Shanghai, where after spending over three years to buy land, build a factory, teach the workers, and start making a small profit, had her factory taken over by the government, people and all, for trumped up charged, and was told that if she wanted to continue doing business in China, that she would have to “import” the products from the company that she built.

This was a good friend of mine, and her company was devastated by this, so I am by no means a pro-China sympathizer.

No matter what people say about Yahoo being a government lapdog, with no consideration for human rights, I still say that they were just trying to keep from giving the government an excuse to take them over.

Just my two cents