Google and China

So this week, Google finally announced that they were leaving the Chinese market as we all expected. The end result was that their google.cn searches were being redirected to their equivalent search results from the Google Hong Kong site. These uncensored results are being displayed in simplified Chinese so they are targeted to the People's Republic. That's a very clever way of bypassing the Chinese law that dictates that searches for certain terms within China have to be censored. That very law is what enacted the Great Firewall of China, which blocks many web sites from being accessed from inside the country. I'm not sure if their Honk Kong site redirection will be very effective in reality though because if a Chinese person searches a censored topic and Google HK provides a list of real-world uncensored results, that person will still be unable to access those sites from within the great Firewall of China. It would be sort of like making the wall transparent: you can see through it but you're still trapped behind. I could be wrong but it looks as if the Google stand for liberty is pretty futile.

What's worse, if they try to serve the sites from their cache, they run the risk of being blocked by the Chinese government, therefore leaving their HK site out of the wall.

Google have marketed their move out of the country in a very clever way as the defenders of democracy and free speech but I don't have very clear what their real intent is. There's a theory that says that their business in China was doomed to begin with, that they can't possibly beat Baidu as the number one search engine in the mid-term and they already wanted out. If this theory were true, Google would be using the Free Speech fight as a way of covering their retreat. Whatever their real reason is, there's something nobody can deny: they are masters at marketing.