Can business and ethics coexist?

The Los Angeles Times reported last month that Disney President Robert Iger was in Beijing renewing his bid to bring the Disney Channel to the 340 million homes in China with cable TV, representing a potential market larger than the entire population of the United States.

At the Intel Developer Forum in August, the giant chipmaker presented a Webcast from China, in which the Intel plant manager proudly stood beside his government partner as they showed off Intel’s latest fabrication plant.

IDG, InfoWorld‘s parent company, also has business interests in China, as do most global companies. China is the modern day version of the 1849 Gold Rush. But consider the story, “Yahoo says it obeyed Chinese law by turning in e-mails,” by Dan Nystedt of IDG News Service, that appeared on our Web site recently.

Nystedt reports that Yahoo turned over messages from a private Yahoo e-mail account to the Chinese government. Those e-mails revealed the identity of Shi Tao, an editorial department head at Contemporary Business News in China’s Hunan province, leading to his conviction and 10-year sentence.

Shi’s crime was sending an e-mail to a New York-based Web site regarding the Chinese government’s warning to its representatives to watch for dissident activity during the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Nystedt reports that Yahoo, in a statement read by spokeswoman Mary Osako, gave the following reasoning: “Just like any other global company, Yahoo must ensure that its local country sites must operate within the laws, regulations, and customs of the country in which they are based.”

Well, here’s another example of local laws and customs, according to an article in The New York Times by Joseph Kahn dated Sept. 21: “For three days and three nights, the police wrenched Qin Yanhong’s arms high above his back, jammed his knees into a sharp metal frame, and kicked his gut whenever he fell asleep. … On the fourth day, he broke down.”

Qin confessed to a crime — murder — that he did not commit. He escaped the death penalty only after a “rare twist of fate that proved his innocence and forced the authorities to let him go.”

Kahn goes on to quote Qin from a letter he wrote to his family: “Police use dictatorial measures on anyone who resists them. Ordinary people have no way to defend themselves.”

Press advocacy group Reporters Without Borders asks, “Does operating under local laws and customs free a company of all ethical considerations?”

I’m not suggesting that companies refuse to do business with totalitarian regimes. But when doing so, high-tech companies in particular must also consider the fact that simply because they can do something — for example, in Shi’s case, find out the identity of the sender of a private e-mail — it doesn’t mean that they should go the extra step and hand that person over to an oppressive regime. This is an issue that goes well beyond doing business with China.

Rather than avoiding this difficult topic, it would be a small step in the right direction to include in the program of every high-tech conference — at breakout sessions, panel discussions, and keynote speeches — the deceptively simple question of what’s right and what’s wrong when doing business. Or will the glitter of gold blind us from even doing that?