The Battle of The Behemoths : Google Vs China

nimo_cn

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Baidu competed with Google to see who could be the best censor for the CCP... that is what Baidu won. Google doesn't have to prove to the world they can censor the internet better than Baidu. They have to prove they can provide the best search engine and they have done that the world over.
So you are implying that Chinese choose Baidu because it does better in censorship? LOL, I thought you said we are in favor of free information( in fact, we are), so by that logic Google should win. But the fact here is Google lost.

Google lost because it fails to provide what Chinese need, there is nothing to do with censorship policy, business is business. So admit it, Google sucks in Chinese internet market becaue of its incapacity, stop blaming Chinese law for its failure.



There is nothing keeping the CCP from revoking their license. If they don't like what Google is doing, kick them out.
If it breaks the law, we certainly will revoke the license and kick it out. Should we beg it to stay in China to trample on Chinese law?

Google has one upped the CCP by making it their game. China accounts for 1% of Google's revenue and then the profit margins are low with transit fees; the PR that will come from standing up for free speech will more than make up for that pathetic loss. This was Google's plan from the start.Sorry you never realised that.
I didn't realise it?

LOL, there has already been Chinese report which pointed out Google's trick, which is depitting itself as a freedom fighter by defying Chinese authority. And to be honest, it is a brilliant plan.

First, it successfully saved it face by deflecting public attention to Chinese authority, no one is caring about Google's failure in China, which is the very reason why it wants to pull out of China.

Second, by doing that, it became a angel now, winning a lof praises from western media.

Third, by gaining all the supports from west and its boss(US government), it has more counters to bargin with Chinese government now. Apparently, it is reluctant to leave China.

From the start, it is about business, it is about money. But Google still successfully turns into a solo show, and wins a lot of sympathy. Well done, Google.
 

bengalraider

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Beijing's Foreign Internet Purge | Foreign Policy
Beijing's Foreign Internet Purge
Is web censorship just an excuse to drive out foreign competition and give a boost to Chinese brands?

BY JORDAN CALINOFF | JANUARY 15, 2010



On Tuesday, Google announced that it is considering shutting down its Chinese site and closing its China-based offices after hackers attempted to infiltrate the Gmail accounts of human rights activists. The company also said that it would no longer censor its search results in China, a virtual death sentence in China's cyberworld.

On the same day, Baidu, Google's dominant rival in China, saw its Nasdaq stock shoot up $64.01, or 16.6 percent. China's third- and fourth-place search engines, Sina and Sohu, witnessed their stocks increase 4.9 percent and 6.2 percent, respectively.

Google's move was not a brave stand against China's lack of Internet freedom. Instead, it was simply the last and inevitable straw. Google, like Yahoo before it, has been systematically forced out of the market by a Chinese government determined to purge all foreign competition from its Internet industry, which is expected to bring in $8 billion in advertising revenue in the next three years, according to Internet research firm eMarketer.com. That number is likely to grow quickly as China's Internet saturation is only about 25 percent, compared with more than 75 percent on average in OECD countries such as the United States.

In a country well-known for copying and mass-producing the ideas and products of other countries, from automobiles to movies, a new economic tool has been invented: an insidious, uniquely 21st-century form of protectionism.

Although this week's news has been perhaps the most visible and largest example of China's "firewall protectionism," Google's exit is just the latest in a long line of foreign Internet firms forced to leave the country on the shaky rationale of national security and censorship.

In March 2009, video-sharing site YouTube was permanently blocked by China's firewall. The Chinese version of the site had been quickly gaining market share against homegrown competitors Youku and Tudou. State news agency Xinhua said that the root cause of the blockage was a video showing Tibetans being beaten by zealous police officers. However, Chinese censors had always been able to block specific videos from being shown in China and had no need to shut down the entire site. Now, Youku is the eighth-most popular site in China, while Tudou is the tenth, according to Web-ranking firm Alexa.

Similarly, in July 2009, after the riots between minority Uighurs and Han Chinese in Xinjiang, China blocked Facebook. At the time, Facebook had been quickly becoming popular with young, coastal Chinese and had a fast-growing base of 1 million active monthly users. The reasoning behind the blockage was that Uighur activists were using the site to communicate and organize. However, the entire Internet was shut down in Xinjiang after the riots and was not restored for a significant period. Meanwhile, direct Chinese copies of Facebook, Ren Ren Wang and Kai Xin Wang, have been enjoying enormous success. Now, Ren Ren Wang has 22 million active users and Kai Xin Wang is the 56th-most visited site globally.

Also in the aftermath of the Xinjiang riots, microblogging site Twitter was cut off by the Chinese firewall for similarly dubious reasons. Less than two months later, Chinese Internet giant Sina launched a near identical microblogging service. To further the business-over-politics angle of China's foreign Internet purge, China's wildly popular instant-messaging service QQ removed a censorship filter after users' complaints. Dissidents and riot organizers can now use Chinese versions of Twitter to organize.

Even a seemingly harmless site, like photo-sharing website Flickr, has been blocked in China, while its identical clone Bababian has grown steadily with foreign technology and no foreign competition. Likewise, blog-hosting sites Blogger and WordPress have long been blocked in China. Instead, Chinese netizens use Tianya, the 13th-most popular site in China. Far from being a sanitized land of boring blogs about daily activities, Tianya also hosts China's largest Internet forum, a vitriolic, sensationalized, and hate-filled arena that makes Western gossip sites seem like the Economist.

In the face of an obvious and systematic form of protectionism in perhaps the most important industry for the future, the cheering from many leading American figures for Google's "brave" decision seems strange. If China were attempting to block the import of American tires, instead of American Internet media, would Americans applaud Goodyear and Congress for not putting up a fight against blatant WTO violations?

Firewall protectionism is part of a greater and dangerous trend. China has recently shown that it is willing to protect its own industries at any cost, even to the point of all-out trade war. By pegging its currency to the weak U.S. dollar, it has made Chinese goods artificially cheap. Third World countries are outraged, and some, like Vietnam, have devalued their currencies to be more competitive. Europe and the United States are also thinking of retaliating and have consistently been increasing pressure on China to allow its currency to float. In addition, China has instituted more traditional protectionist measures in the green-tech industry by excluding foreign companies from bidding on several wind turbine projects.

So when media reports that Google's decision is a reaction against China's desperate need to censor the Internet and spy on activists, and not about protectionism, it rings false. In a country where dissidents are routinely jailed for years without fair trials under the dubious charge of "inciting subversion of state power," and poor petitioners from the countryside are routinely thrown into Beijing's horrendous black jails for simply airing grievances, it seems strange that China truly needed to hack into human rights activists' email accounts. A more likely explanation is that it was simply trying to find a way to block the world's biggest Internet giant out of the Chinese market and was searching for the right button to push. As for Google's "threat" to pull out of the country, China will certainly not be begging them to stay.
 

bengalraider

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China's Silicon Ceiling
The Beijing/Google skirmish is a reminder that free markets require free minds.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, Jan. 16, 2010, at 7:12 AM ET
Google vs. China represents a clash of what may be the two most powerful forces of the first decade of the 21st century. Like China, Google has changed the terms of competition in crucial markets, thanks to its advantages in hardware, productive capacity, and engineering brainpower. The juggernaut rolls into new industries—e-mail, GPS, smartphones, operating systems for netbooks—heedless of the competition, rolling up profits and disheartening rivals.

But now one of the world's most rapidly growing companies has threatened to quit one of the world's most rapidly growing markets. It's a move that raises many questions about Google and its future—and a larger question about China. Can China get rich without becoming free?

History suggests it can't. Until recently, China, which was technologically more advanced than Europe in the middle of the last millennium, had been left behind. Historians, led by the magisterial David Landes of Harvard, have made a convincing case that the slow erosion of arbitrary authority—the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the rise of rights, constitutions, democracy—helped stoke the capitalist revolution. For the last few centuries, the developed world has been led economically by democratizing commercial empires—Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the United States in the 20th. Without free minds, it's difficult to have free markets, and vice versa. Trying to develop economically while controlling the flow of information has generally been a losing bet. Either such regimes fail to grow and collapse (the Soviet bloc), or the forces of economic liberalism ultimately lead to political liberalism, as in Chile.

For the last 30 years, China has been testing a new, inverted model: breakneck economic development while retaining strict limits on personal liberty. The Communist Party has wrenched the nation into the 21st century. The hardware is certainly impressive—the maglev trains, shiny new airports, and modern skyscrapers. China has displaced the United States as the world's largest car market and is about to surpass longtime rival Japan as the second-largest economy. Such growth has attracted American companies, which inevitably make a series of trade-offs when they decide to head east. They accept local joint-venture partners and the risk of intellectual property theft, and learn to negotiate a commercial culture in which the government may arrest and jail a key executive, as happened with Australian mining giant Rio Tinto. As a group, the Fortune 500 have overlooked or come to terms with the lack of political freedom. After all, General Motors and KFC are in the business of selling stuff, not principles. And they have to be in China because that's where the action is. "If you don't come to the Chinese markets, other countries will," said Zheng Zeguang, director general of North American Affairs in China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

That's why Google came. Last summer, Google advertisements were ubiquitous in Shanghai. But Google is unlike other U.S. companies that have succeeded in China. It sells access to information. Its business model requires freedom of linking, surfing, and expression. And that's why it, along with other media and New Economy companies, hasn't done well in China. Google has 14.1 percent of the Chinese search market, compared with homegrown Baidu's 62.2 percent. Worse for Google (motto: Don't be evil), doing business in Guangzhou means being complicit in activities that are antithetical to its mission. "How far do you go down the path to becoming a de facto adjunct to government control of information?" asks Zachary Karabell, author of Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy.

Google's software engineers became billionaires by devising a democratic algorithm. China, too, is led by engineers, but civil engineers. They believe the nation is getting richer precisely because they are keeping democratic tendencies in check. In the two weeks I spent in China last November, I heard Westernized elites make all sorts of rationalizations for why the time isn't right for democratization. The main argument: In a nation of 1.3 billion people, 56 ethnic groups, and unbalanced development, encouraging free elections, civil society, and political organizing would be a recipe for chaos—and an obstacle to growth. One senior bureaucrat pointed out that the growth rates of South Korea, Taiwan, and Indonesia declined once they became more democratic. "When you emphasize development and efficiency, then you have a problem with the system of democracy," said Zhe Sun, director of the Tsinghua University Center for U.S.-China Relations in Beijing. For a regime whose legitimacy rests on economic progress, no such delays can be tolerated.

Yes, Shanghai feels a lot like New York. But don't presume that just because Americans and Chinese share a consuming culture that they also share a political one. As I stood in Tiananmen Square on a chilly November day, I turned to my guide. "That was really something, what happened here 20 years ago," I said. "Yes," he responded in his near-fluent English. "Those terrorists really killed a lot of soldiers."

The crisis that plunged the world into recession has only given the Chinese more confidence in their model. In November, I met with Qian Xiaoqian, vice minister of the State Council for Information of China. "To say the Chinese government controls the Internet is exaggerated," he said. (After the meeting, I fired up my laptop and was blocked from getting to Twitter, Facebook, and Andrew Sullivan's blog.) Qian enumerated all the things people can't do on the Internet: no online pornography, no attempts to incite racial discrimination, and no attempts "to violate the Chinese constitution and subvert the state." The rules, however, are arbitrary, opaque, and subject to change.

Qian ticked off the impressive numbers—China had 338 million netizens as of June 2009, 700 million mobile subscribers, and 180 million blogs. That's certainly enough users to build businessesaround, with or without Google.

Can China continue to grow without allowing Google—and the next Googles of the world—free rein in China? It's worked out well so far. But there are a few caveats.

First, China still has a long way to go before it's considered rich. And some sympathetic analysts argue that it's not fair to hold China's civic development to American standards. The United States had China's present-day economic profile—per-capita GDP of about $5,000, 40 percent of the work force in agriculture, 30 years of industrialization and urbanization—in 1900, a time when there were no direct elections for Senate, women couldn't vote, and segregation reigned in the south.

Second, much of China's extraordinary development has been based on moving peasants into manufacturing. The key to future job growth, says Stephen Green, chief economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai, will lie in the services sector. And the largest components of the services sector—financial services, entertainment, media—remain firmly in the grip of the state. Going forward, it will become more difficult for a services-based economy to prosper with restraints on communication and expression. China faces a fundamental paradox, says Damien Ma, an analyst at the Eurasia Group. "It needs to have fairly closed information flow for political stability purposes, but doing so stifles innovation."

And that's the rub. Any type of political system can produce excellent hardware. The Soviet Union, which ruled Russia when Google co-founder Sergey Brin was born there in 1973, managed to produce nuclear weapons and satellites. Likewise, China has built truly impressive hardware: some 67 bridges now spanning the Yangtze River, a superfast supercomputer assembled entirely from parts made in China, high-speed trains. But in the 21st century, a country needs great software in order to thrive. It has to have a culture that facilitates the flow of information, not just goods.

Newsweek's Nick Summers contributed to this story.

Slate and the New America Foundation will host a talk about China, Google, and Internet freedom on Jan. 20 in Washington, D.C. Click here for details.

Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback.
Article URL: Why Beijing is making a mistake with Google. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine



Copyright 2010 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
 

mattster

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Real truth about Google China is finally coming out

Well guys, it seems that the Google threat to pull out of China is really more about insider espionage job in Google's China office..

Now its all starting to finally make sense. The google decision is about much more than just Chinese censorship - Google is really pissed at the hacking of private email accounts by their own Chinese employees.

It seems like some Google China employees played a major role in the cyber attacks and hacking of email accounts belonging to Chinese dissidents.

Its obvious that these employees were CCP "planted spies" in the company and that the Chinese military or CCP was engaged in the activity for a long time.

This is really bad because it shows the reach of the CCP in China.

What this means for any major MNC based in China is this - everything is within the reach of the CCP.

No IP or anything confidential will be secure because you will never know if your employees in China are secretly passing on information to the government, or state agencies.

Read the article below in the Telegraph-UK. British newspapers seem to be doing a better job on reporting this story.

Google China hacks 'a possible inside job' - Telegraph
 

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