Amnesty International next week plans to use Google's annual meeting to call on it and Microsoft to stop cooperating with censors in China. Shareholders should take heed, and not just because it's morally repugnant to collaborate with repression. In the short term, it's obviously good business to be in China, but there are longer-term consequences that should be considered...Google agreed to censor its search engine... Microsoft has censored some of its content... Cisco Systems has sold equipment that the authorities used to build what is now called the Great Firewall of China. Yahoo has been the most egregious, turning over email data that Chinese authorities used to identify three dissidents who were then imprisoned... American tech companies say they are simply complying with the laws of the land to avoid getting kicked out. But they could resist more forcefully, as they do when protesting China's failure to protect intellectual property. They are willing to cave on human rights for a simple and understandable reason: They feel they can't afford not to be in China. Yahoo has condemned governmental punishment of free expression and says it is discussing with other tech companies voluntary guidelines for doing business in China. Microsoft says it only follows legally binding censorship orders. Cisco says it merely sold China off-the-shelf products that could be used for numerous purposes... To Google's credit, it discloses to Chinese users and outsiders what is being censored. It keeps servers for message boards, blogs and email offshore to avoid Chinese government demands for such private data... Let's not pretend that this controversy is a key issue for American tech companies' share prices...right now [China is] only a modest contributor to profits... Emboldened by tech companies' eagerness to play in China, why wouldn't the government try to use its might to give favored local companies a competitive edge? Or perhaps it might censor information that is vital to conducting business there. "What if the government doesn't want to let people know the banking system is weak?" says Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch... There also is the risk to tech companies' reputations... Finally, there's the inconsistency of lobbying for intellectual-property rights while not standing up for other rights... If the Chinese government sees how compliant they are in one arena, perhaps it will find it that much easier to blow off concerns about patents and piracy.