Google With Chinese Characteristics
At first the tussle between China and Google over the free flow of information seemed like a contest of brute strength. But it's becoming clear this is more like a Chinese exercise known as "pushing hands." The object is to make an opponent fall over, but often the best way to do that is to let him lose his balance by trying to topple you.Yesterday brought the news that Beijing has renewed Google's license to operate in China. That shows that Beijing knows that throwing Google out entirely would only expose its censorship regime to greater pressure—from its own people finding ways around it as well as international condemnation.
Recall that in January Google announced it would stop self-censoring search results on its China site. However, it also wanted to keep doing business in China and so had to find a way to avoid breaking Chinese law. In March, the company began to redirect users from the google.cn page to its Hong Kong site, google.com.hk, which was uncensored. Beijing objected to that automatic referral, so on June 28 Google made a minor concession by stopping the automatic redirect and instead provided a link to google.com.hk that users could click on. Google's renewal application deadline was June 30.
To be clear, Chinese users still aren't getting uncensored search results. If they use google.com.hk to search for forbidden topics, the data are stopped by the Chinese government's "great firewall" software. The user gets an error message and sometimes has the Internet connection cut off for a short period.
The main differences now are that Google is no longer complicit in the censorship, and the user is more aware that the search request is being censored. When Google was doing the censoring, the only indication that search results were incomplete was a small message at the bottom of the screen.
Beijing is no doubt hoping that many Chinese netizens will find the blocked pages too annoying and abandon Google, using the main domestic competitor, Baidu, instead. But the Google search engine and the company's other services remain important tools for many Chinese. Although Google caused some loss of face to the government by taking a stand, blocking Google entirely would only highlight the country's political backwardness. Google, meanwhile, wants to keep a toehold in this huge and rapidly growing market, and for now it seems to have done so.
This is good news for everyone, not least Google's investors, who saw the company's shares climb 2.4% yesterday. The calm may not last long, as China's censorship is even now facing new challenges from social networking sites and Twitter. But give Google credit for standing up for its principles while operating in a country with a government that is still hostile to the free flow of information.
Source: Wall Street Journal
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