Yahoo continues to get no breaks on the China front. As CNET's Declan McCullagh writes, the company has found itself ambushed by Julien Pain of Reporters Sans Frontieres (blocked in China), a man who I am sure, in Yahoo's point of view, is aptly named:
Yahoo's long-running defense of its Chinese operations, which have been criticized for close cooperation with the country's police agencies, took an unusual twist this week in a confrontation at the company's headquarters.

Julien Pain of Reporters Without Borders, a free speech advocacy organization, stopped by Yahoo's San Jose, Calif., headquarters on Monday accompanied by a film crew from ABC World News Tonight. In a moment reminiscent of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," Pain asked to meet with company executives--but Yahoo sent out its security guards instead.
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Eventually, after tense negotiations accompanied by threats of having him arrested by police for trespassing, Yahoo relented and arranged a meeting with two unnamed executives. "They were just trying to handle some PR crisis," Pain told CNET News.com afterward. "It's a PR crisis? No, it's a human rights crisis."
Personally, Imagethief feels it is unfair of Pain to malign this as just "some PR crisis". This is a humongous PR crisis, and Imagethief is happy not to have been on the receiving end of it. I will definitely give Pain props for the masterful sound-bite as well. Unfortunately, Yahoo's main sin appears to have been being early into the market and not having a chance to learn from others mistakes. Google has pointedly decided not to officially offer e-mail services in China in order to provide itself with some jurisdictional insulation. Whether this helps them in the breach remains to be seen. More on Google in a moment.

Yahoo's problems were compounded by a particularly wobbly response, which has largely orbited around the "just complying with local regulations" defense, which is now something of a cliche. Rebecca MacKinnon very recently excoriated Yahoo for Jerry Yang's statements about Yahoo's role in the China market.

Imagethief is inclined to be a bit sympathetic. On balance, he feels it is better for Yahoo and the other American Internet companies to be in China than to not be in China, and he feels that Yahoo's main crime was lack of foresight with regards to the liabilities they might encounter by setting up in China. Nonetheless, they haven't made themselves many friends in the US (or in France) with anything they've said publicly in the past few months. That has left the door open for activists such as Pain to continue twisting the knife, even as others reap the benefit of their misfortune by avoiding their mistakes. Furthermore, now that Yahoo has passed operational control of its China business over to Alibaba, a Chinese company, they have lost a degree of influence over what happens with their own brand in China. If I were them, I'd be a bit worried.

From a PR point of view, this is a hell of a tough nut. Yahoo's PR managers may wish to read crisis PR guru Peter Sandman's lengthy but fascinating recent column on "The Outrage Industries", which covers how outrage is wielded as a tool in the shaping of public agendas. Sandman covers the doctrinal response to such situations, which will make interesting reading for anyone following this crisis:
Although your critics’ goals and your goals are diametrically opposed, your optimal strategies are not. Once again the situation isn’t symmetrical. In order to keep the outrage building, your critics need to show that you have misbehaved. But showing that you haven’t misbehaved is almost certainly more than you can accomplish — especially when you probably have, one way or another, and your critics own the moral high ground. Your goal, as a rule, is to show that you know you’ve misbehaved and are contrite — that you have heard your critics, that you’ve taken their criticisms on board, and that you’ve improved. Your critics probably aren’t willing to give you credit for improving. But you can give them credit for making you improve.

Better still, you can sometimes set up an accountability mechanism whereby your critics genuinely do make you improve and pretty much have to say so. For more on this strategy — which is hard on corporate egos but good for corporate profits (and good for the world, since it calls for genuine improvement) — see my October 2002 column on “Accountability.”
The highlight is mine. From where Imagethief sits, neither Yahoo nor their competitors also operating in China have paid much attention to this advice. Contrition is light on the ground. Justification is still the order of the day. We'll see how this continues to unfold, but Pain, and other amplifiers of outrage (to use Sandman's language) don't seem inclined to let the issue rest. As long as they don't, Yahoo's reputation and brand will continue to sustain damage.

Meanwhile, Google is also making news today. Google just held their official China launch party, along with local and foreign press activities. Imagethief, being not in their sight, snuffed it was not invited. He has met people who were invited, and can report that display a strange, beatific glow as though anointed by some higher power. As you would expect, Google also offered little new by way of explaining their rationale for entering China and submitting to Chinese censorship regulations. As the New York Times reports:
BEIJING, April 12 — Google's chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, whose technology company has been sharply criticized for complying with Chinese censors, said today that Google was not lobbying to change the country's censorship laws and, for now, had no plans to do so.

"I think it's arrogant for us to walk into a country where we are just beginning operations and tell that country how to run itself," Mr. Schmidt said during a question-and-answer session with reporters from foreign news organizations.
Well, that is true. It's also beside the point of the strongest criticism that has been directed at Google, which has been more around the decision to enter the country at an official level rather than the concessions they have made to do it. Google's management of this situation, on the whole, has been better than Yahoo's, but Google has had the benefit of being able to see what happened to Yahoo and to make some business decisions based upon that. This has lowered their risk and helped them to avoid the kind of criticism heading Yahoo's way. At the risk of repeating himself, Imagethief still feels that it is better for Google to be here in an official capacity than not be, and feels they have taken reasonable steps to balance their concessions to the Chinese government with transparency for their users in China. This has come at the cost of a drubbing from some of the Chinese press.

Google did seem eager to spare their government attendees any discomfort, as Red Herring reports:
Beijing—Google event organizers in the Chinese capital put a twist on censorship on Wednesday, when they asked government officials—including members of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission and the Beijing Commerce Bureau—to exit a Google press conference at the Beijing Hotel before taking questions from reporters.
Well, you don't want to embarrass your hosts, especially when your hosts are the Chinese government and you're still trying to get all your license paperwork sorted.

Related: The Frontline web roundtable on China's Internet with, among others, Rebecca MacKinnon and Danwei's Jeremy Goldkorn. Via Asiapundit, an Internet censorship map from the Internet Censorship Explorer.

Update: China Daily runs the AP version of the story across two pages and, inexplicably, finds a way to avoid the censorship lede that every other English-language story went with. In fact, no mention of the censorship questions at all. Go figure.