A Simple Story

During dinner tonight we had a quick debate on whether it was a good idea for Google to do so and what the CPC's view of this is. Perhaps it actually benefited both parties, as Google hasn't pulled out completely since they're now in a free market state that's still part of China. Meanwhile, the government can save face (God knows how important face is to Chinese people) by showing that they have unwavered and Google was the one forced to make the adjustment. With the servers out of mainland China, the great firewall of China can now censor all results on the China catered google.com.hk. No Google censorship help needed; win-win situation. OR Google just made a horrible move by pissing the government off even more -almost like a "na-na-na-nana you can't catch me" taunt.

During dinner I was agreeing with the former. But on the way home, I started thinking about how the Chinese government has been handling this since the move. The first thing that came to my mind, which speaks loudly of the government's pov, is that they have combed through all Chinese bbs forums and deleted every Google-favouring post and thread. And they didn't stop there. With some social seeding work, they planted threads and posts here and there to fuel negativity towards Google.

As we all know, the CPC is pretty good at telling people what and how to think. Then again, those who would actually care and notice the Google censorship issue are the more educated and hopefully can think for themselves. But most importantly, widely affected are expats who cannot live without google and those are the same expats who would have bought a VPN to climb over the great firewall of China.

Anyway, at the end of the day maybe it doesn't really matter since Baidu (a Made in China search engine) owns more than 50% of the market share and Google China only brings in 1% of their revenue.