晕菜的旅程

Google China was founded in 2005 by ex-Microsoft employee KaiFu Lee.  It is the second largest search engine in China, but trails the leader Baidu in market share by a considerable amount.  The next largest search engine Sogou has a much lower market share than Google.  Years ago Google agreed to censorship by the Chinese government in a controversial decision.  Some critics of Google said this goes against their motto of “Don’t be evil.”  Searches for keywords such as “Tiananmen Square”, “Tank man”, and even “freedom” were among those that were censored.  Now, in light of attacks on their servers allegedly by government spies, they are reacting by refusing to comply with censorship laws.

These recent attacks made by hackers into Google mail servers has caused the California based Internet super-company to threaten to quit serving the entire country altogether.  This has stirred reactions from people from all fields, including the US Government, the Tech Industry, and of course, the Chinese people.  The reaction from the Chinese government was basically, “Go ahead, we don’t need you”.  President Obama is publicly supporting Google on their stance.  The tech industry is mixed.  Yahoo is siding with Google, while Microsoft says that it is silly to give up on the Chinese market. As a member of the PRC, what do you think of Google?  Is it a friend or foe?

One reason to believe that Google helps China is the quality of the services that it offers.  The services that Google offers include search engine, news aggregator, mail service, map service, satellite service, video sharing, and pinyin service just to name a few.  These high quality services certainly can’t be overlooked.  Another reason to believe China benefits from Google is the fact that Google is a foreign company.  This shows the Chinese peoples’ willingness to cooperate and compete with foreign countries in the global economy.  In today’s globalized world, a country will undoubtedly benefit by doing business with companies from foreign countries.  Just like Google is competing on Chinese ground, in the future Baidu for example may compete on American soil as well, which is healthy for the economy and healthy for the consumer.  Finally, Google technically hasn’t done anything wrong by reacting to the government this way.  Google was the victim of these attacks, after all.

On the flipside, there are many reasons to be skeptical about Google’s helpfulness in China.  For one, this recent ultimatum proposed by them shows that they are on different sides of the political fence than the Chinese Government.  Others argue that Google is a business, not a political entity.  They shouldn’t be involved in politics in the first place.  These people criticize the overall professionalism of Google’s leaders.  They feel that by turning down a huge market like China altogether, they are acting emotionally rather than logically.  Finally, from a nationalistic point of view, Google does pose a threat to the domestic companies in terms of being a fierce competitor.  If Google were to leave, Baidu would be the de-facto search engine in China for years to come. 

It will be interesting to see how this whole affair between China and Google pans out in the end.  Until a decision is made, I’ll be following the story keenly.  By the way, all pictures used in this article were found using Google China’s search engine, which of course is censored.