Intel's Otellini: we can change China

AT IDF this morning, Paul Otellini was outlining his vision for the future of Intel. His colleague, Inq favourite 'kicking Pat Gelsinger', gave a warm welcome to a Chinese Government delegation, here for the first time at IDF.

This posed an interesting question. Over on Intel's corporate governance website, it lists "Consumer choice" and "Informed consent" as critical to its values of personal privacy, as part of its ethical business plan.

The Chinese government, as you will certainly know, has a policy of suppressing anti-establishment information on the net, and has recently laid down its plans for providing life-imprisonment for citizens partaking in a spot of pornography.

How, we asked Paul, could he reconcile Intel's ethical business model with support for this type of regime?

The reply was that "We have to work with the environment". Interesting. Paul expanded: "Think back to the issues we had with WAPI: we were able to work with the Chinese to persuade them to follow the worldwide standard for WiFi. If you don't even have the dialogue, you can't do that." Apparently, having the dialogue is crucial. But crucial to what?

Intel stopped short of saying that it was working on Westernising them. In fact, we wonder how much Intel has really made an effort to challenge China on humanitarian issues, as well as technological and commercial ones. We suspect its involvement with China is more to do with its status as the biggest new technology market in the world - a fact Intel explained at lengths to us this morning. As long as the Chinese have money, we suspect the western world will pander to them, enabling the suppression that is currently the status quo. Have money, will make a fuss of at IDF. Won't somebody please think of the children?