Google may have decided that pressure and censorship from the Chinese authorities are just a tool limit their growth, and so it is simply not worth maintaining a future presence in the people’s republic, blogs Lindsey Hilsum.
In China, many commentators believe Google is challenging the Chinese government to provoke expulsion because their business is doing badly. The Chinese search engine Baidu is twice as popular – it has reportedly 63.8 per cent of market share, as compared to Google’s 32.8 per cent.
With 338 million internet users in the People’s Republic that’s still a fair number. But the Chinese government is not going relinquish control over anything to do with information, so Google may have come to the conclusion that pressure and censorship are just a tool to limit their growth, so it’s simply not worth it.
These kinds of tussles have happened before. When Peter Mandelson was EU Trade Commissioner, he told me one of his biggest headaches was a dispute with Xinhua, the official news agency, which was trying to control all commercial information.
The ideas was to take the Chinese business of Reuters and Dow Jones. It was about censorship to some extent, but it was also about money. Xinhua wanted the business for the sake of profit as much as information control.
The government’s been trying to pressure Google for some time. Last June, the government and state TV accused it of spreading pornographic information on the internet. On 24 June, Google mail accounts were inaccessible for four hours. More than 20 million email accounts were affected. Qin Gang, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, warned Google to follow Chinese law if it wanted to do business in China.
Some people (including my esteemed colleague Jon Snow!) think Google’s action shows western companies getting tough with China. I disagree. I think Google is throwing in the towel. China blocked a deal in Copenhagen. China is likely to veto sanctions on Iran. China holds the bulk of US debt. China has refused to devalue its currency despite years of US pressure. China stopped President Obama from meeting “ordinary people” when he visited China, instead making him take a long, lonely walk along the Great Wall.
China, in other words, calls the shots. Some progressive people in the Chinese system may worry about loss of face internationally, but most Communist party officials will think “Good riddance to Google”.
Of course, Google’s decision is a hot topic on the Chinese netsphere. Not however on Baidu, Google’s rival. Its chief design officer wrote: “Comments are closed here. If you want to whine, go to twitter. You are not welcome on my turf.”