Google's recent announcement of pulling its business quarter out of China has stirred intensive discussions both in China and worldwide. I am not particularly interested in this issue itself, as the scarcity of information and complication of the matter may distort my judgments. What is interesting though, is the implication from this event. There are several aspects I would like to address here: censorship, monopoly, democracy, vulnerability of information, and some others.
Let us begin by recapitulate the issue first. The annual revenue of Google worldwide, according to New York Times, is over 22 billion USD, while the local revenue is China is about 300 million. That is to say, in a nation takes up almost one fifth of world population, third in GDP (2009), and over 338 million internet users, this number is evidently a proof of business failure. No matter what reason causes today’s situation, Google agreed with Chinese government for censorship when it began its business back in 2006. But 4 years later, with a failed business, taking a stance of freedom fighter, promoting the ideal of ‘Don’t be evil’, and pulling out its business out of China with the excuse of 20 or something email accounts of human rights activists were hacked, just seems to be somewhat absurd, if not self-contradictory. Maybe there are other critical issues that an outsider cannot fathom, but if Google want to pull its local branch out of China and blame it on the communist government, it got to do a better job. The feud between Google and Baidu, its major competitor in China, has been long and deeply-rooted, and they have countless criticizes on each other. You may think Baidu is a malicious company for its monetary page ranking system and other dirty hacks, but it’s working for the majority of Chinese who don’t speak very fluent English and who don’t give a f*** to what the human activists are doing. They just worry about stocks, markets, sports, online deals, movie and music downloads, just like lots of people doing everyday everywhere around the world. This phenomenon can also be seen in online discussions in China, also reported by CNN, that people are clearly divided when reacting to Google’s announcements. Some showed grief and support as expected, while others are disinterested or even want Google to get out of China. Nevertheless, Google made best by what is left in the bowl.
The reason why I personally think this series of events is premeditated, is because overall excuse is shady, and Google’s terms for Chinese government of non-censoring search content leave no room for the talk to maneuver. Under current circumstances, the Chinese government can by no means agree this term, which not only opens the first case of compromising national censorship, but also a disgrace for the government public image and even has the potential danger of arise nationalism, angry Chinese netizens discontent that the government compromised to an American company. It also left no room for itself to sustain in China right now for it just unleashed the rebellious claw. Even both sides can reach some sort of agreement after the talk, China definitely will keep watching on Google.cn and give it a hard time. No matter what, it’s just a perfect timing for Google to cut its failing business in China.
The reason I began this article by criticizing Google is I really don’t like the censorship card it’s playing here. Google is an innovative and great company, but I don’t think as a gigantic media cooperation running under any political system can run away without censorship. There was a funny comment on CNN, and I barely recall, was like ‘If I curse bible on this website my post got deleted fast, and that’s funny’. And another case I can recall was last year when the Olympic torch relay reached in San Francisco, some Chinese student posted a video on youtube criticizing Tibet freedom activists. This video reached around 2000 or more comments but was deleted by youtube suddenly. My point is that no matter where you are, censorship is always there. It’s only a matter of what the degree of censorship is, who is deciding it, and who’s executing it. I don’t think anyone can seriously believe Google is able to run an entirely censorship-free search engine, it’s just on certain issues, Google, or some other greater powers behind it, wants the Chinese to see, and China is explicitly censoring it. This censorship card is just like discrimination card and freedom card: you can always use it, but just got to use it wisely. To China, I think it’s undergoing a migration of explicit censorship to an inexplicit and unobtrusive form. There will be a day that Chinese suddenly discovered that they can search all the sensitive terms, but this change definitely will not happen as radical as Google’s terms to the Chinese government. Nevertheless, Google is only a company. No matter how extensive and influential it is, it cannot wrestle with a foreign government. And I think Google knows it very well.
This whole series of events, also stirred discussions everywhere. What is interesting is not joining into these discussions – as neither I think I have the capacity to understand the entire issue nor I think any of my perspectives would be influential – but to observe the mindsets of people when rapidly sharing their thoughts. The topic of Google easily extended to democracy, freedom of speech, censorship, internet regulations, sino-america relations, blah blah blah. Democracy is the ideal, but under this ideal freedom of speech is definitely not cursing each other with hatred and assertion. I have read some threads these days, but in majority of cases people are not discussing the issue, but merely speak out loud, identify those who think differently, then dump all variety of cursing on them. These discussions are paradigm of ‘with me or my enemy’. I even read things on a forum as one guys suggested ‘we should wipe all Chinese out of this planet’ or ‘set all Chinese back to where they were’. My point here is why people tend to impose rather than listen? Why people tend to reach a quick conclusion rather than careful observation and pondering? This also makes me realize how difficult job the government is doing. I am by no means praising any government, but when sometimes people criticize communist censorship, they probably are enjoying the free movies on tudou.com or music downloads from Asia which is otherwise banned in United States. We always want the policies in our own favor, thus criticize the unfavorable. The reality is, there’s no policy that will benefit everyone. Google’s loss is Baidu’s gain, or maybe China’s loss. This entire event is a multivariate power struggle, and probably we should learn more before we reach a conclusion.
What this whole event struck me, is how vulnerable our information is. There may be a day that suddenly my email got hacked, or certain website went down, then suddenly I lose all the contact there. There was a huge concern that if Google.cn bailed out of China, will Gmail still be available to Chinese? Twitter and facebook are both not accessible in China now, which means if I go back home I have the potential danger of losing contact to all my friends there. This could also happen anywhere, and when the world is getting smaller, the reliant we are on information technology, our bonds are getting weaker at the same time. There are some people I talk with online every day, but except their email address I don’t even know where they are. The sin of information technology is convenience, which also reduced redundancy. We are too lazy to back up files as things are readily accessible online; we are even too lazy to burn discs as the capacity of hard drives grow rapidly. And what I have learnt, where my capacity relies, are totally based on information technology. Imagine there’s a global blackout, what remains useful for myself is only I am bilingual, I can draw you some pictures on a street booth or I can dive a vehicle. Without computers my programming languages are useless. My career will ultimately be built on some others’ career, the higher I go up the pyramid, the more it becomes and the harder I fall. What I learned most from this event myself, is get out of the comfort zone always be prepared for a crisis like this.
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