It is not a new thing for us that has been a fact for a while, which is Google shifted its service site to Hong Kong in 2010 instead of staying at mainland China after two-month negotiation with Beijing on opening web freedom broken down.
This bold move incident was being reported too much since last year so I will not explain in detail here. A vedio here very clearly explained the whole incident.
The point I want to highlight is that even though Google moved its search engine to Hong Kong, residents in mainland China are still blocked by government’s filtering system when they use google.com.hk while google.cn is already gone. Therefore, the search result for Chinese residents seems to be no difference. The search information is blocked, censored, filtered, as always, until now. That is what is happening in mainland China.
The point I want to highlight is that even though Google moved its search engine to Hong Kong, residents in mainland China are still blocked by government’s filtering system when they use google.com.hk while google.cn is already gone. Therefore, the search result for Chinese residents seems to be no difference. The search information is blocked, censored, filtered, as always, until now. That is what is happening in mainland China.
While, the only difference for Google HK is that in HongKong the company doesn’t need to censor and filter the search results by itself and is totally open to all users though some sensitive results will still be blocked on the way to reach residents in mainland. Since the search result will not be much different from previous time, especially for mainland users, a question here is why Google finally chose to move to Hong Kong to add up a simplified Chinese language search service with a traditional language already being there for people in HongKong. From the perspective of economy, compared to a tiny HongKong territory, mainland China holds a huge internet market potential for Google, and they can’t get any benefit after standoff with Chinese government. The below speech from an insider may explain the motivation supported behind:
"China is a very desirable market for anybody and Google has been growing there for the past couple of years, even though it is still well behind Baidu on usage. They could very easily have taken the short-term view and said 'we'll play the regime's game'. But they have decided not to and they should be congratulated on that."
Which is more important? Is it the economical benefits in a short time or the long run perspective following up the company’s principle which is respected not only in business world but also valued generally over the world. The shift showed the company’s attitude that Google didn’t and will not give up Chinese internet market but on the other hand Google insisted to be a free and open-up search engine company.
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