Co-founder and CEO of Yahoo! Jerry Yang ‘90 had perhaps never in his adult life received a verbal beat-down as harsh as the one U.S. Congressmen so zealously dispensed last week. The noted Stanford alumnus and University Board of Trustees member was summoned before the House Foreign Affairs Committee to answer for a 2004 incident in which Chinese officials identified and ultimately imprisoned Chinese journalist Shi Tao after obtaining his email records from Yahoo! From his Yahoo! account, Shi had “divulged state secrets abroad” by forwarding a government communique warning journalists not cover the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre to several foreign publications. The 39-year-old Shi, first deprived of his right to inform — and now of his basic freedoms — is currently serving the second year of his 10-year prison sentence.

In 2004, Yahoo! General Counsel Michael Callahan told Congress that Yahoo! employees at the time did not know that a political dissident was sought when the Chinese authorities requested information; Yang added that “if they give us the proper documentation in a court order, we give them things that satisfy local laws.”

However, it was revealed last week that Yahoo! personnel in Hong Kong apparently understood the nature of the allegations against Shi when they handed over his personal information. This, combined with Yang’s indifferent attitude and defense, has resulted in repeated attacks by critics who point out that Yahoo!’s Hong Kong-based holding company was not governed under mainland Chinese law.

Yang, who finally apologized to Shi’s mother in court last Thursday after months of apparent reluctance, has also refused the demands of some U.S. Congressmen to offer the Shi family financial aid. Callahan offered the feeble explanation that Chinese officials might retaliate against the Shi family.

Yet official intervention in Yahoo!’s business interests in China is a scenario that is equally likely. Yahoo!’s presence in China provides greater public access to information, and there may be necessary concessions made for the greater good. However, handing over the private information of a client with the knowledge of the repercussions is indefensible. We are certainly not the first, nor will we be the last, to suspect that Yahoo!’s betrayal of its own client appears to be an attempt to ingratiate the government of a country that holds enormous profit potential.

Yang tried to appease his listeners by saying that he was hard at work with lawmakers to establish legal guidelines for these fuzzy intersections of international law and corporate ethics. However, his actions and words thus far express indifference at best. In one particularly ironic comment in his testimony, he said, “I believed [at an early age], as I believe now, that [the United States] is a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world.” Moreover, those affiliated with this University have every reason to cringe as disgrace by association arrived in the next sentence, as Yang spoke of his Stanford education.

At his brightest moments, Yang represented one of our best, a true Stanford son who became a patriarch of the Silicon Valley. Subsequent classes of Stanford students embraced the role model of the man who changed the world and simultaneously made a vast fortune through his brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit. But at this moment, we at Stanford, like the many Chinese who admire Yang’s success after emigrating to America at age 10, can only turn our heads away in disillusioned shame.