Eastandwest's criticism of Ms McKinnon's article was ill-founded.

Nowhere does McKinnon presume to lecture the Chinese government on their abuse of their citizens' human rights, except by her well-taken criticism of Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for taking part in these human rights abuses.

It's appalling that censorship and imprisonment of people for their political speech has found such rabid and thoughtless defense. By eastandwest's logic, we were right to blind ourselves to the murders committed by Hitler and Stalin during their heyday, to say nothing of the mountain of corpses piled up by Mao. After all, none of those dictators were "swayed one bit by what American companies/citizens" thought they should do (i.e., stop persecuting and murdering their own people for political dissent).

And anticipating the inevitable retort, one doesn't have to defend the stupidities and outright tortures committed by a handful of poorly-supervised troops in Iraq to recognize and detest even worse and much more systematic human rights abuses which are being abetted by American firms. Abu Ghraib was an aberration; the suppression of domestic dissent and jailing of dissidents is characteristic of Beijing.