Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a great story on the "My Way" murders in the karaoke-obsessed Philippines. The Times story noted that over the past decade, at least half a dozen people have died just after (or while!) performing the Sinatra tune, ginning up a local legend and landing the story on the NYT's most-read box, a rarity for an international affairs piece.

I looked back at some English-language Filipino news sources, where stories about the "My Way" murders and Filipino karaoke culture abound. A 2002 Philippine Daily Inquirer piece entitled "Rage Against the Machine," for instance, reads: "'My Way' still holds the record for sending the most number of local singers on their way to their Maker. I just read from our Metro pages last week that another fellow got knifed to death that way....Maybe the suspect objected violently to the way his [duet] partner carried his part? Maybe he felt being drunk was not an excuse?...Extreme aesthetics."

Here at FP, we wondered how karaoke became so popular in the Philippines in the first place. The sing-along machine is apparently a fixture in bars, clubs, and private homes, and popular even at funerals.  It turns out, that is in part because Filipinos consider karaoke to be a local invention -- though its provenance is a long-standing international dispute.

It all comes down to Daisuke Inoue of Japan and Roberto "Bert" del Rosario of the Philippines. Inoue argues that he built the first karaoke machine and rented it to various bars and clubs in Kobe, Japan, starting around 1971. He coined the phrase "karaoke," which means "empty orchestra" in Japanese -- and never filed for a patent for the invention.  

Del Rosario says he never heard of or saw Inoue's invention. The music-school head says that he created his "Sing Along System" around 1972 and patented the first prototype, under the name "The One Man Combo," in 1975. He alleges that a group of Japanese businesspeople visited his offices, saw his machine, and replicated it in Japan.

"I can rightly claim to be the inventor of the SAS or karaoke because of the international patent ruling that the first person to patent his product is the inventor," del Rosario told the Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2002, after years of disputing the karaoke machine's origins. "The main reason why I developed the SAS is the fact that Filipinos love to sing."

The Toyota logo is displayed on a box of auto parts at City Toyota February 5, 2010 in Daly City, California. Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda issued an apology today for saftey issues that have prompted the recall of nearly 4 million Toyota cars and trucks that could have accelerator pedals that can stick.

The onslaught of recent commentary on U.S.-China disagreements has come so fast and furious over the last two weeks that one could be forgiven for thinking startling tectonic shifts had just reshaped the surface of the Earth.

But the funny thing about most of the news highlighted is that it isn't really news: China upset about the U.S. announcing arms sales to Taiwan?  Old school. China objecting to a U.S. president meeting with the Dalai Lama? Status quo. China dictating the terms by which foreign companies can operate within its borders?  Long true -- the real news here isn't that China did anything different, but rather that Google picked this moment to raise the issue so publicly.

In fact, although the headlines we read are mostly about China, a better case could be made that a more pronounced change in attitudes is occuring within the United States, especially among the chattering classes and in Washington. Suddenly even mundane stories about friction with China are being fitted into an uber-narrative about dangerously escalating tensions. And once a grand narrative takes hold, watch out: it gets harder for the facts to speak for themselves. 

What has changed across the Pacific is perhaps the stridency of Beijing's tone, if not the substance of its complaints. But a more striking shift is evident in Washington, where China-phobia is rising, all economic news seems to be bad news, and defensiveness is ascendant.

Since when is the uplifting applause line in a president's State of the Union address: "Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America. (Applause.)" 

(As if George W Bush would have even entertained the thought of being number two.)

Writing today in Time magazine, Jeffrey Wasserstrom makes a smart point that surely applies here: "Just as all politics is local (to a degree), all diplomacy is domestic (to a large extent)." 

Remember how I said 2010 would be a rough year for U.S.-China relations?

The first shoe to drop was Google's announcement that the privacy of Chinese human rights activists using its email software had been violated, and that cyberattacks on its servers had been traced to within China. 

Now, China is expressing furious anger over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan -- threatening unprecedented actions in response, including sanctions on U.S. companies, and hinting darkly of a broader unwillingness to cooperate with American diplomatic priorities (read: North Korea and Iran). Military-to-military cooperation between the U.S. and China now seems to be off the table, and deputies-level talks will be suspended.

Truth be told, China hadn't been and probably wouldn't be super helpful on Iran and North Korea's nuclear programs, but the direction the relationship is taking is worrying. In February, President Obama is supposed to meet with the Dalai Lama, and that is sure to provoke further ire in Beijing.

Obama administration officials had been expecting some blowback from the arms sales, and are downplaying China's reaction, but I wonder if even they see Beijing as upping the ante. Is this going to be the usual loud, public show of anger, followed by a return to business as usual? Or is China feeling its strength and looking to demonstrate that it can force the mighty United States to change course?

I detect a bit of arrogance in Beijing right now. Most recently, Colum Lynch reports, China sent a third or fourth-tier diplomat to U.N. discussions over Iran's nuclear program. At the climate talks in Copenhagen in December, not only did China seem to renege on promises it had made earlier, but Premier Wen Jiabao famously snubbed other top world powers by sending his deputy to a high-level meeting (I'm told by one participant that French President Nicolas Sarkozy was especially angry about the slight). This kind of thing may not make headlines, but it shapes other countries' willingness to make concessions and accomodate China's interests at the margins.

China is going to learn sooner or later that the famous line from Spider Man -- "with great power comes great responsibility" -- applies to real-world superpowers as much as it does to fictional superheroes.  Let's just hope it's sooner.

With Google threatening to pull out of China, immitation versions of the search engine and its video subsidiary YouTube have emerged to take their places on the Chinese internet:

YouTubecn.com offers videos from the real YouTube, which is blocked in China. The Google imitation is called Goojje and includes a plea for the U.S.-based Web giant not to leave China, after it threatened this month to do so in a dispute over Web censorship and cyberattacks.

The search engine behind Goojje was likely designed before the Google-China kerfuffle began then renamed as a marketing gimmick, and indeed the results it returns are fairly different than Google's. (Goojje vs. Google searching for "Foreign Policy".). The site apparently complies with Chinese censorship guidelines, like the old chinese google. I tried searching for "Dalai Lama" and got his official website. "Rebiya Kadeer" worked also. When I typed in a Google-translated version of "Dalai Lama" in Chinese characters, the top result was an article titled, "The Road of Treason." When I typed in "Falun Gong," in English, I got an error message. The same thing happened on multiple computers.

YouTubeCn is more more freewheeling, with videos on the persecution of Falun Gong and Rebiya Kadeer available. While the layout is an almost exact rip-off of YouTube, the videos are really buggy with many requiring new versions of flash player and others not working at all. 

Neither site seems like much of a substitute for the one it's based on in terms of functionality. I don't think Baidu should have much to worry about. 

In China, a few dozen mournful souls have begun a candlelight vigil outside Google's Beijing offices.(I'd love to know more about who they are). But for the most part, the debate in China over the higher meaning of Google has been more muted than in the United States, where Google's threatened withdrawl from China has been widely interpretted as a harbinger of worsening US-China relations.

Within China, the Chinese-language state-run media carried relatively cursory coverage of Google's threat to pull out of China, with scant mention of the alleged cyber security breaches. Here's the (translated) barebones text of the Chinese-language Xinhua wire story:

Google announced on January 12^th that it might shutdown Google.cn and withdraw from Chinese market completely.

Google's chief legal officer David Drummond declared the announcement on Google's official blog in the afternoon of the 12^th.Chinese reporter later verified the announcement with Google and Google'scommunication department confirmed Mr. Drummond's posting.

Google indicated that they will discuss with Chineseofficials about those legal issues in the next few weeks.

Google also cancelled its scheduled negotiation with China'sWritten Works Copyright Society on the 12^th afternoon withouttelling why.

(That last line, perhaps, is meant to make Google sound like an especially irresponsible player?)

Meanwhile for the benefit of foreign reporters, China's Foreign Ministry did convene a press conference to state that China's laws are China's laws:

After a day of silence, the Foreign Ministry said that China welcomed foreign Internet companies but that those offering online services must do so “in accordance with the law.” Speaking at a scheduled news conference, Jiang Yu, a ministry spokeswoman, did not address Google’s complaints about censorship and cyberattacks and simply stated that “China’s Internet is open.”

Twitter is, of course, officially banned in China, but the most tech-savvy Chinese "netizens" have found a way around the Great Firewall to use the micro-blogging service nonetheless. This group is, as Rebecca MacKinnon duly observed, a highly select sampling of Chinese public opinion: "The Chinese Twittersphere -- comprised exclusively of people who aretech savvy enough to know how to get around censorship or they wouldn'tbe there --  is generally cheering the news [that Google won't continue to follow existing censorship rules]."

While noting the selectivity of this group, it's been interesting to follow tweet reactions around the hashtag #Googlecn. China Digital Times has translated some of them here: 

@qhgy RT @Lyooooo: If Google leaves I won’t use Baidu or let my children or grandchildren use it (If I have them) #GoogleCN

@zz4040 Google is a real man #GoogleCN

@Fenng Ten years online has turned me from an optimist into a pessimist #GoogleCN

@mranti Withdrawal of Google means: 1 Scaling the wall is now an essential tool 2 Techies, you should immigrate. Really #GoogleCN

That last tweet is from  Zhao Jing, a prominent political writer and blogger in Beijing who writes in English-language media as Michael Anti. He spoke at length with The New York Times' Andrew Jacobs, explaining why he thought that Google’s pulling out would “set a bad example for thebusiness climate in China and make a joke of the government claims of afree Internet.”

My colleagues here have been weighing in on Google's "bombshell" revelation that China has been spying on dissidents and human rights activists, trying to crack open their Gmail accounts, presumably with the aim of monitoring and disrupting their activities. A lot of commentary is so far focused on the immediate issue at hand -- China's crushing censorship and Google's controversial policy of accomodating it in the hopes of gaining market share (see Jordan Calinoff's excellent dispatch on how this policy has largely failed). Of course, we already knew China did this sort of thing, but having the details so dramatically thrust into the public sphere is shocking. This is going to be a huge, ongoing story, not only because Google and China are two of the biggest and most widely debated news topics in the world, but also because nearly everyone's going to sympathize with the people whose privacy and peace of mind has been violated.

There's a larger story developing though, of a very tense year in relations between China and the West. Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer made that prediction earlier this year, and it's probably happening even faster than he imagined. In addition to this Google story, which U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already jumped on, there's also a brewing U.S.-China fight over arms sales to Taiwan, China's recent missile test in retaliation, and a guerrilla trade war that now seems more likely to develop into a full-blown trade conflict.

By overplaying its hand with the activists, and messing with a huge global company with a massive ability to get its message out, China has foolishly just thrown away whatever goodwill it has built up over the years through its "charm offensive" -- at least in the West. Now, those arguing across a range of issues that China is a bad actor have been handed an enormous rhetorical club to beat Beijing over the head with. It's going to get ugly.

Last month Google's operations in China noticed that a sophisticated hacking operation had illegally attempted to access the records of dozens of targetted Gmail users -- specifically those of prominent human rights activists, based in China, Europe, and the United States. This information, which obviously aroused great concern within the company, wasn't made public until yesterday, when Google announced a significant change in how it would operate in China.

In a press release posted on its web site Tuesday, Google explained that it would cease to comply with China's internet censorship provisions, which had prevented users of China.cn (Google's China web portal, launched in 2006) from accessing "sensitive" sites:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

On Wednesday late morning Beijing time, Internet users in Beijing and Shanghai reported being able to access -- for the first time -- formerly forbidden images and web links, including photos of 1989 Tiananman Sqaure demonstrations and links to freetibet.org, through Google.cn searches. This led to speculation that Google had already removed filters.

Google's apparent defiant stand -- that it will operate freely within China, or not at all -- quickly launched a heated debate. Many applauded the company' principles; others wondered how much Google really has to lose if it does exit China, given that business there has not met expectations.

Writers on technology web sites, such as Slashdot.org and Techcrunch.com, were quick to point out the company's bottom-line concerns. As Techcrunch technology reporter Sarah Lucy wrote:

I’ll give Google this much: They’re taking a bad situation and making something good out of it, both from a human and business point of view. I’m not saying human rights didn’t play into the decision, but this was as much about business....

Google’s business was not doing well in China. Does anyone really think Google would be doing this if it had top market share in the country? For one thing, I’d guess that would open them up to shareholder lawsuits. Google is a for-profit, publicly-held company at the end of the day. When I met with Google’s former head of China Kai-fu Lee in Beijing last October, he noted that one reason he left Google was that it was clear the company was never going to substantially increase its market share or beat Baidu. Google has clearly decided doing business in China isn’t worth it, and are turning what would be a negative into a marketing positive for its business in the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Wired reporter Kim Zetter traces some of the steps Google has taken between when it discovered the cyber attacks and now, both to protect its own employees in China and to warn the international human rights activists targeted.

[A] source who is knowledgeable about the investigation [said] that Google’s decision to disclose the attack on Tuesday was also partly due to a decision made by the other targeted companies to keep the attack under wraps.

“They made a specific decision not to go public,” the source said. “You can either go out [with the information] or not, and for whatever reason, they’ve decided not to [disclose].”

He said Google felt it was important to alert the people who are potentially affected by the attack — the activist community.

Among many looming questions, one key one is: How will Microsoft, Yahoo, and other web portals react? Is Google setting a new precedent?