I am a Chinese, and I live in New York, so I think my opinion is more insightful at some points.
Let’s take a step back, and look around the world. There are many countries in this world are censoring information, for various reasons: political, religious and culture reasons.

US Allies, for example, Egypt is a country that censors information on the web. The annual U.S. human right report always attacks on Egypt. Has Google says anything to Egypt yet? No.

Last week I attended a panel talk at Baruch College, and a panelist gave examples of U.S. allies that do censor information, and surprisingly, Austria was on the list.

The only reason Google complains about China’s censorship is the political pressure from Washington D.C.

Coming back to the original fire, which was the claim that PRC attacked and hacked Gmail accounts, which belonged to some civil rightists. It was an evidence that, U.S. government, as the biggest supporter of human rightists, outspoken to Google, pressured them to take action.

China is now sees as a raising power among a few others, and is always portrayed as the opponents to the US supremacy. China’s Prime Minister wrote an article two weeks ago, publicly stated that China will not, and should not become that superpower the medium have imagined, for another ten, twenty years. He literally said that China is growing, but the overall living standard is low and there many problems and unrest in China.

The White House, on the other hand, feared China’s raising. The White House has lost the absolute dominance over the Congress, and the recent polls showed a decline in support as well. She has to fight back.

This is a drama, as some of you have pointed out.

It is not fair to China, to be picked on. While I do agree that censorship is not a good idea, but we the Americans must learn to respect other nations. We dig too much into other countries’ businesses. Way too much.

Google is a US based company, and we have learned business imperialism and protectionism since the first Roosevelt age, back in early 1900s. Google said US government never entered her final decision, and I must acknowledged this as a cover-up, or simply just a lie.

When we say Iran is bad, and we acknowledge protests in Iran, we praise those who go against the government. But what about our own American people? Does China ever make public announcement say “we support the Republican on against health care reform?” No.

Just because these countries are not as liberalize as the western, we should not and shall not make the situation even worse.

We have heard US government attacked other networks (nation, terrorists, individuals) from the news. Should the Eastern companies walk out US like Google?

Do not get fool by those politicians. Founders of Google hated Soviet, and they hated communists. Even India, a democracy country has censorship. Why don’t Google leave everywhere but US?

Questions and questions. Wonder why? It is just about who is a better actor in this drama.

I am not so sure of that. The CCP is not known for its fast impulsive reactions. Most important decisions are taken by consensus, and this usually takes time, nobody wants to act too fast and get burnt, especially now that the Expo is going to put China in the spotlight again. But I think there will be a reaction, even if it might take months to appear.

My guess is first victims will be Gbuzz and GReader, which are 2 of the most useful tools that exist today against internet censorship. They are less high profile than Search and Mail, and the government can block both of them easily without a big international fuss. Here is what I wrote about this on Buzz:

I just read a post by 安替 on Gbuzz thanks to @Sijia Chen who Buzzed it. The original post was blocked by the Chinese GFW and inaccessible from China.

This just made me realize again just how powerful GBuzz is against censorship. If there is a GFWd post you want people to see, you just press a button on it (the GReader share button) and it automatically becomes available on https connection to all the users of Buzz, unblocked.

Which is precisely why I am so pissed off that Google are kicking their own ass out of the country.

WTF, they had so much potential to fight against evil here!! Instead they did a fucking mess, shamefully collaborating with the censors for 4 years, and when they had enough leverage to do some good influence, they throw all their efforts down the drain because of a childish fit of moral righteousness by S Brin.

Why give up and refuse to do the hard work when they are most needed? Fuck that!

What you are seeing now is that GoogleHK offers uncensored search results, with many entries in the list can not be clicked open, and sometimes the result page gets blocked if you try a particularly sensitive keyword. This, however, is not the revenge of the government.

It’s nothing more than regular censorship of the massive system commonly called Great Firewall (GFW) built into China’s internet infrastructure. All internet traffics are filtered when they go through the GFW, and *anything* containing sensitive contents gets block exactly like what you are experiencing on GoogleHK. Even before Google’s formal entry in 2006, we were trying to use a cranky Google.com enduring such frequent blocking. Now it’s like going back to the good old time. No biggie.

My point is: By igniting such a drama with Chinese government, Google didn’t actually make anything any better or worse, to itself or to Chinese government. Chinese people still have a cranky Google (filtered results and unfiltered result plus blocked pages do not have much difference). The censorship won’t get loosened. Through all this Google brought nothing but some more uncertainty and some dim hope here. That’s it. No harm, no good, everything moves on as usual, even the search market share. I don’t think Baidu’s gaining any ground after Google’s retreat.

I see what you mean but I believe Google has done a smart thing. Both sides save face. The Chinese government gets what they want and Google gets what they want.

I never said that Google doesn’t have the right to have a voice. I also never said that international corporations don’t have a voice in politics, of course they do.

I just argue that, in my opinion, Google is doing a good thing, but it is doing it wrong. And I think this will be bad for the Chinese users and bad for the internet as a whole.

Now, regarding the business side, that is a different discussion. But even there, I am pretty sure in the long term it will be a mistake. Chinese internet is a complex, fast changing system, and not even geniuses like Brin (no irony here) can predict what it will look like in 10 years.

To be cut out from a massive market AND to burn all the bridges to come back looks like a bad idea to me, regardless of the short term goodwill it will give Google in the West.

It is true that the Google algorithm itself can have some involuntary censoring effect, as the vast majority of users of simplified mandarin are within the GFW and they dont access Google through proxy.

On the other hand, I have the impression that Chinese simplified and traditional are the same language in Google search (ie. searching for a term in either of them gives the same results). I still have to test this more to be sure, but normally all the conflictive terms in simplified should yield lots of results from Taiwan as well.

Good point anyway.

I am not sure if your company is as large as Google but to say that large corporations cannot have a voice in international politics is very naive. Wal-Mart has a major impact on international politics. Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP have used their muscle to affect international politics for the better of their companies. Google has every right to use their economic and public relations might to achieve their goals. Whether those goals are congruent or against the overriding US/China policy is moot.

Companies just like states are there to protect their own self interest. I have no doubt that Google knows what it is doing. In one post on here you show the total users of the internet by location and language. It would be interesting to see the online economic activity by geographic region and language. The consumer miracle of China is not going to happen anytime soon if it ever happens.

Maybe we all failed to notice this but Google does not want to lose face as well. This move to Hong Kong where legal ambiguity lies allows both the Chinese government and Google to keep face. China can still block the links that pop up on Google and Google can tell the bleeding-hearts in the US media that they kept their promise and have stopped censoring search results in China.

The interesting thing about what Google is doing (and you may disagree) is that Google may be saying that the US government’s approach to China is a failure. For the last 30 years the US government has had a policy of engagement with China. It would be interesting if the Obama administration takes a different approach to China once they see that Google got what they want.