MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif./BEIJING—The war of words between Google and China has reached the level of high-stakes brinkmanship, reflecting similar political tensions between the United States and the communist regime.
A day after Li Yizhong, minister for industry and information technology, harshly scolded Google for being "unfriendly and irresponsible," the search giant said it will likely close Google.cn.
Sunday, a few days after President Obama called on Beijing to move to "a more market-oriented exchange rate," Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao took umbrage with the suggestion that his country was unfairly manipulating its currency and said it was up to the United States to improve the deteriorating relationship between the two countries.
In both situations, one side is accusing the other of serious violations of its territorial or technological integrity. China claims the U.S. is violating its sovereignty by hosting the Dalai Lama and selling arms to Taiwan, and Google has officially objected to what it claims were a series of cyber-attacks mounted from inside China against its U.S.-based servers.
Each spat seems to be climaxing simultaneously, with the Google-China imbroglio reaching a seeming impasse just as Sino-American relations hit a new low. Google, whose market share in China has steadily grown over the years to 30 percent—compared with the 63 percent share enjoyed by the Chinese company-run Baidu.com, which proactively censors its content in line with government regulations—said in January that it would end the controversial censorship of search results in the wake of the alleged attacks.
"Google said that in mid-December it had identified a 'highly sophisticated and targeted attack' on its corporate systems 'originating in China,'" reported the Financial Times at the time. "The group added that it had found evidence of similar attacks on “at least” 20 other companies in finance, the media and other sectors."
A post to the Google blog expressed the company's plans: “These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”
Friday, Li spoke directly to Google's promise to end the censorship of search results, issuing a thinly veiled if vague threat, “If [Google] takes steps that violate Chinese laws," "that would be unfriendly, that would be irresponsible, and they would have to bear the consequences."
In February, the Dalai Lama actually tied the simmering issues to one another, telling Reuters that U.S. search engines have a unique and important role to play in the campaign to free Tibet.
"The Dalai Lama, who was to speak on behalf of Whole Child International, an organization that works for orphans around the world, said Western search engines like Google were important such as the free flow of information within China," said Reuters. "He noted they had ceded to pressure from the Communist government there to limit what users can see."
Google's retreat from China would certainly reshape that equation, despite the fact that a number of other search engines, including Western ones, would still be doing business in the country.
According to Wikipedia, they include Google China, Yahoo! China, Microsoft's Bing and MSN Messenger, Sina, Sohu's Sogou, Wikipedia, NetEase's Youdao, Tencent's Soso.com and PaiPai, Alibaba’s Taobao, TOM Online, Xunlei's Gougou and EachNet.
In addition to censoring political search results, China also has restricted access to adult websites, which are outlawed by the government. For many years, China also has engaged in a ruthless campaign to shutter China-based porn sites on the internet—and now on mobile networks—in the process jailing thousands of people accused of running them.
