Via Frostfirezoo, here’s an interesting picture of image search results for Tiananmen on normal Google and Google China. The results, unsurprisingly, vary wildly depending on whether you search from China or not.
I find this sort of problem immensely interesting and a serious gray area. Google has taken a lot of heat for this in past. On the one hand, you have a company whose corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”, yet hiding the uncomfortable truths of history for one fifth of humanity is hardly model behavior. On the other hand, the government of China has always been able to leverage the size of its domestic market to impose strict constraints on how foreign companies operate within its borders. The Communist Party of China will control the flow of information, whether or not Google is there. Should Google deny itself (and its shareholders) the benefits of operating in an enormous market because of realities that it has no control over?
There are externalities as well. In sum, is the fact that Google operates (even if search results are skewed) a net benefit for the Chinese people? I’m sure that you could make a convincing case for it: I’d be lost without Gmail, Gcal, and Google Reader (and this blog probably wouldn’t exist.) Again, though, we’re talking about one of the world’s preeminent technology companies: is it really fair to let them off the hook so easily? Shouldn’t they have used the leverage that this position gives them more aggressively?
There are no right answers here, but I think this is a great example of how complicated and nuanced the great issues of international political economy are. Feel free to hash it out in the comments. For what it’s worth, I believe that China’s bargaining power was significantly larger than Google’s. I’m willing to take some unavoidable censorship now with the hope that things will evolve as China becomes richer and more integrated into the world economy.
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