A new approach to China: an update

[jsm386]

Pretty frightening that they need to reiterate this (they mentioned this in the original announcement): Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.

[analyst74]

If the Chinese government is going to hold some google employees responsible (for whatever), do you think reiterating that statement is going do anything?

Don't be partisan.

[lotharbot]

IMO, the most valuable thing to come out of all of this is the China apps status dashboard:

http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

tells us what China is currently allowing, blocking, or partially blocking.

[eob]

Seriously. It would be nice to see a widget like this that anyone could throw up on their site or blog. Problem would be getting the update -- you'd have to have a server in China pinging all the participating sites, I suppose.

This could be a very nice way for the web to passively protest China's censorship: put a strip at the top of your blog that displays whether or not your blog is readable in China at the moment. Even if the Chinese couldn't see it, plenty of people outside of China would, raising awareness of the problem and putting pressure on China.

[lanstein]

Awesome, except the munged copyright symbol. Pretty unusual for Google to have encoding issues in copy (and not to be using the entity).

[garply]

Re: the wrench by Google docs. Google spreadsheets are blocked here, but not the rest of the service as far as I can tell. Why? One can only ponder what goes on in the censors' heads.

[bnomis]

It's a few years old but Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/ may be interesting

[grandalf]

And the most valuable thing to be squashed by it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211947

[csytan]

It would be nice if they listed the status of Appengine too.

[jessriedel]

What do "Web" and "Sites" mean? I assume one tells us whether China is blocking Google search results.

[vorg]

Just made it my new home page!

[jbellis]

The last paragraph says a lot between the lines. "Please don't put our employees in jail."

[larsberg]

I still remember globalization training back at Microsoft. The short version was, "Take this stuff seriously. A few years ago, somebody left the string Taiwan in a product and China detained & questioned a bunch of unrelated employees who just happened to be in-country." Of course, the world was a different place ~2002.

http://bit.ly/b5ocjf

[kylec]

They really should offer to relocate them to the US

[IsaacL]

My first thought was that they were trying to protect their employees from the Chinese people, a subset of whom seem quite keen on starting nationalistic internet lynch mobs. Obviously the government is pretty dangerous as well, but I thought it was interesting that they weren't the first thing that sprang to mind.

[wqfeng]

Google doesn't have to make this statement. I believe no one will be put in jail because of Google's leaving. And it's not a BIG issue as you think.

The Chinese people cares house, education and health care more. Most of them don't use Google at all.

[TorKlingberg]

It is possible the Chinese government will only partially block google.com.hk. This it how it has often worked with Wikipedia. You can browse the site, but as soon as any forbidden phrase is passed over the TCP connection it is cut. Then all access to the site from your IP is blocked for a while. This makes the service very intermittent, and makes it difficult for users to distinguish between censorship and overloaded servers. There is also the question of what will happen to the google.cn domain, as all websites in China are required to have an ICP license from a government agency.

[chaosmachine]

"It's entirely legal ... We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision"

Not much of a leg to stand on. I wouldn't want to be a Google employee in China right now.

[potatolicious]

My main fear is that China will use this opportunity, as the Chinese proverb goes: "kill the rooster to warn the monkey" - i.e., arrest/charge a few higher-level Google China people (Chinese citizens, they won't touch Americans).

Public opinion in China re: Google is very, very much sided with the Chinese government - people in general believe Google to be bullies pushing their American-style beliefs down their throats, and the people I've spoken to almost unanimously think that it's about damned time Google left China.

If a few key people are arrested/charged for conspiring to violate the law, it would be a major PR victory for the PRC domestically ("government stands up to Western bullying tactics, no safe refuge for collaborators" and the such), not to mention potentially warding off other companies trying to make the same stand.

Interesting times.

[liuliu]

Actually, it is not legal in terms of China law. The law requires any website, in mainland China or not, need to implement a process called beian (a licensing procedure and that is the reason why you can see ICP XXXXXX on any Chinese target website). It is a strong legal justification that gives local police the authority to block any foreign website at will. For a commercial website, the beian process will cost about $1000 dollars (you have to hire agency which has close connection to the Chinese government to do this) and any foreign website in principal cannot implement this process (it requires or in tradition only limited to the company that significant share (more than 50%) was hold by Chinese capital entities or individuals). Google.cn, prior to the announcement held a ICP licence from its local partner. Kaifu Lee did a lot work in the back scene that made the whole ICP transaction procedure OK to China government.

For your curiosity, the local Chinese companies that were listed on NASDAQ all go with a mode in which the company that registered in China will hold the license and sign a contract with the offshore company that actually gets listed to guarantee the profit will go to the offshore company in order to mitigate the restrictions.

[Spark23]

that's true, but in my opinion it's better than constantly caving in to censorship

[garply]

Hey Googlers on HN, I live in China and access Gmail from my local connection. Where is my Gmail data located?

[EricBurnett]

Disclaimer: this is not an official answer from Google, and while I have worked there I do not at present.

There are data centers around the world, however Google only stores sensitive data in locations where it can guarantee security and privacy[1]. Quoting from an official blog post from 2006,

"Protection of user privacy -- We will not maintain on Chinese soil any services, like email, that involve personal or confidential data. This means that we will not, for example, host Gmail or Blogger, our email and blogging tools, in China."

What this means is that your data could be stored in a number of countries, which will include a copy in the U.S. and not include a copy in China.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony-internet-in...

[wisty]

It hopefully won't matter. I'm on the mainland, and my gmail, igoogle (now re-directed to google.hk), and google translate are up.

News and search have been surgically removed.

edit: search is up? down? wtf? Whatever, I can use yahoo.

[houseabsolute]

In some ways I can't believe they actually did it.

[orangecat]

That's actually brilliant. They're both complying with the letter of the law and forcing the Chinese government to actively shut them down. I hope all their non-Chinese employees have exited the country...

[garply]

Some things I used to be able to search for on google.cn, but are now filtered by my ISP (via connection reset):

http://www.google.com.hk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8... (6/4)

http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q... (Tian'anmen 1989)

I'm sure a native Chinese can give a better list. Superficially at least, it looks like ISP level censorship has gotten worse.

[tomerico]

Isn't it a little scary to search this stuff in China?

[ntoshev]

What about Google Cache?

[SlyShy]

And all this time analysts were saying Google would stand down from its principles on this matter. I quite like this page: http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en as well as the general tenor of these actions.

[ErrantX]

For all the rights and wrongs of such a decision; kudos to them for going through with their threat.

[dawgyDoo]

I thought their threat was to leave. They haven't exactly left. It's more like they've thrown more doodoo into fan.

[startingup]

I have some colleagues and good friends in Beijing, most of them coming from various provinces to Beijing for their jobs - they are not high up in the ladder socio-economically. The impression I get is that they love China (to the extent of choosing not to go abroad to live and work), but resent the party's overbearing ways. They are not going to go out and protest, but that doesn't mean they like their government much either. They tell me banned publications are fairly widely available, if you know how to find them, and many of them are fairly knowledgeable about stuff the party doesn't want them to know about.

[mjhnghfh]

Funnily enough I have colleagues in the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc who feel exactly the same way.

[euroclydon]

Could this be the first big salvo in a protectionist effort against Chinese imports? It certainly provides some political cover for the Treasury to declare CN a currency manipulator in the next couple of weeks.

Are there any projections out there of how tariffs would affect technology the markets?

[nzmsv]

Sadly, you are being downvoted, though I think questioning things is "the hacker way". It is one thing to just yell "freedom" and quite another to actually analyze things.

Personally, the speed with which the US government issued a statement last time this story surfaced really surprised me, and makes one wonder how close the relationship between big corporations and the government really is.

[mbreese]

The two things are completely unrelated. How does Google ceasing to self-censor results in mainland China have anything to do with the Treasury's response to Chinese currency policy? It would be a mistake to conflate the two.

[zellux]

http://www.google.cn now redirects to http://www.google.com.hk/, and there is a line of message saying 欢迎您来到谷歌搜索在中国的新家, which means "Welcome to the new home for Google Search in China".

[jboydyhacker]

Whatever this leads Google needs to stay in China even if they ban it in Hong Kong.

Supposedly one of the reasons Google's stand has been so "principled" is because of Sergey Brin's early years in the Soviet Union.

That begs the question though, if the Soviet Union had Google and the internet would it have collapsed sooner or would it have taken longer?

[DEinspanjer]

I think it is funny that I am visiting China right now and I cannot see the article because googleblog.blogspot.com is blocked. I'll have to bookmark it to be read when I get back home.

[vorg]

I found a copy of the text on: http://en.mye.ir/a-new-approach-to-china-an-update/ available from within China.

[queensnake]

I haven't seen anyone mention, how long it'll take for China to ban Google from Hong Kong. I understand it runs the place already (indirectly maybe), sure they'll have to change laws, but I haven't gotten the impression that that's an obstacle.

[quant18]

sure they'll have to change laws, but I haven't gotten the impression that that's an obstacle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Basic_Law_Article_23

Last time China tried to change a law here, 500,000 people marched through the central business district, the secretaries for security and finance resigned, and the law never got passed. So no.

[neilk]

I hope they gave Google.cn employees a chance to resign. Ideally, a month or two ago.

[algorias]

Most employees can resign at any time they wish. Not sure why Google would need to explicitly "give them a chance". Am I missing something obvious?

[sliverstorm]

That would put the ones who didn't resign in even hotter water; it would be seen as, 'you had a chance to get out and you chose to stay? That's even worse.'

[mattjung]

Respect to Google! But I'm afraid the servers in Hong Kong will be blocked very soon.