Will Google really pull out of China?

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It’s been two months since Google announced its intention to stop complying with China’s internet censorship laws – but so far, beyond the single blog post that announced its change in strategy, nothing more has been said on the topic, at least in public, by the Californian internet giant.

At South by Southwest in Texas this week, Kaiser Kuo, former director of digital strategy for the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency in China, gave an illuminating talk that looked at the history of Google and other Western internet firms in China, their relations with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and likely outcomes of the current détente.

Google’s blog post about its change of heart regarding China was followed very quickly by a combative speech by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which explicitly endorsed Google’s position. According to Kuo, conservative forces in the CCP assumed this was not a coincidence.

In response, the CCP issued only bland boiler-plate statements about how companies operating in China must comply with local law, and if anything Google has had an easier time than you might expect in the last two months. Google Docs and Google Groups, two services which the CCP has blocked in the past, have been unblocked, for instance.

Why the wait?

According to Kuo, the long hesitation on the part of the CCP is due to the increasingly complex relationship between the Chinese government, people and the internet. In China, the internet is very much becoming the de facto public sphere.

Some of China’s netizens are often extremely nationalist and believe the government should take a stronger line against Western internet companies, especially in light of Clinton’s speech.

However, a good number are pro-Google, and while the CCP can appease the nationalists by talking tough on another issue such as Taiwan or Tibet, for a number of tech-savy urbanites, Google and censorship is their issue – “it’s how they’re defining themselves,” according to Kuo, and it’s being conscious of this audience which is stopping the CCP lashing out at Google.

Some Western commentators have characterised Google’s move as a retreat from China, but Kuo showed that since 2000, when it first started offering Chinese-language search on Google.com, the company has built up a sizeable and very identifiable audience.

In part, this is because Google’s approach to operating in China was not as black and white as simply capitulating to the CCP’s desire for it to censor results. It was very transparent about the fact the results it presented for instance, with a message in Chinese on each page saying that certain content was omitted owing to local laws.

It also took real pains to protect users, avoiding the mistakes Yahoo made, such as locating servers inside China. This meant Yahoo could be forced, by the authorities, to hand over data on activists such as Shi Tao, who is serving ten years in jail for an email he sent using Yahoo mail.

Google also protected the physical safety of its Chinese employees. All Chinese companies have to have individuals who are named and liable for its actions, and in Google’s case they were always in California or Hong Kong.

Nothing to sneeze at

As a result, the company started to gain the respect of the techno-savvy urban elite, and built a market share of around 35 per cent, with around $300 to $400 million a year in revenue.

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