After finding hackers had violated some of their users’ Gmail accounts last December and threatening to pull out, Google had kept mum about what it’s final decision will be. It shut down its google.cn site yesterday and is redirecting all traffic to its uncensored Hong Kong site in a final dig at the Chinese government. Of course, China can just block the site in the mainland if it really wanted to, but at least Google was able to give them one last middle finger. Sure, Google has just up and left 400 million Internet users — a real loss, according to some business-driven people — but I can’t help but think this may be even worse for China.
The Chinese government may think it’s standing up to the West and not letting some company dictate the rules. Google may have overplayed its hand: it’s not Google’s place to force China to open up, so good for China for not backing down. But good for Google for not backing down, either. It isn’t just “some company,” and China knows this. Google’s got clout, and its pullout highlights how uncooperative China will be and how definitively set it is on maintaining an iron grip on the flow of information.
Predictions of the Chinese people being relegated to a world of darkness are over-dramatic and simply untrue. China will be fine without Google. But it has to know that through the negotiations, it has effectively pushed the company out and rejected the opportunity to become a more open and freer society — despite repeated claims that it is an open country. What China is doing is reinventing what “openness” means, a Herculean task even for such a formidable country as China, and in doing so, making no attempt to hide its desire to be and solidifying its role as “the Other.”
For some reason, even though I never used google.cn, I can’t find my way out of the Hong Kong site now. Help!