For three decades now, China has been trying to create a high-tech, advanced, modern economy—in order to prop up a primitive, brutish political dictatorship left over from the dead doctrines of the previous century.
Clearly, something's gotta give, and China is now being faced with this contradiction in the form of a potent (and long overdue) threat by Google to withdraw its service from China in protest over the government's breach of Google's system in order to spy on pro-liberty activists.
"Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China," Andrew Jacobs and Miguel Helft, New York Times, January 12
Google said Tuesday that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country altogether, citing assaults from hackers on its computer systems and China's attempts to "limit free speech on the Web."…
Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.
Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyberattacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists….
While the scope of the hacking and the motivations and identities of the hackers remained uncertain, Google's response amounted to an unambiguous repudiation of its own five-year courtship of the vast China market…. The company said it would try to negotiate a new arrangement to provide uncensored results on its search site, google.cn. But that is a highly unlikely prospect in a country that has the most sweeping Web filtering system in the world. Google said it would otherwise cease to run google.cn and would consider shutting its offices in China, where it employs some 700 people, many of them highly compensated software engineers, and has an estimated $300 million in annual revenue….
Google executives have privately fretted for years that the company's decision to censor the search results on google.cn, to filter out topics banned by Chinese censors, was out of sync with the company's official motto, "Don't be evil."
Clearly, something's gotta give, and China is now being faced with this contradiction in the form of a potent (and long overdue) threat by Google to withdraw its service from China in protest over the government's breach of Google's system in order to spy on pro-liberty activists.
"Google, Citing Attack, Threatens to Exit China," Andrew Jacobs and Miguel Helft, New York Times, January 12
Google said Tuesday that it would stop cooperating with Chinese Internet censorship and consider shutting down its operations in the country altogether, citing assaults from hackers on its computer systems and China's attempts to "limit free speech on the Web."…
Since arriving here in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what citizens can read online.
Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyberattacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail user accounts of Chinese human rights activists….
While the scope of the hacking and the motivations and identities of the hackers remained uncertain, Google's response amounted to an unambiguous repudiation of its own five-year courtship of the vast China market…. The company said it would try to negotiate a new arrangement to provide uncensored results on its search site, google.cn. But that is a highly unlikely prospect in a country that has the most sweeping Web filtering system in the world. Google said it would otherwise cease to run google.cn and would consider shutting its offices in China, where it employs some 700 people, many of them highly compensated software engineers, and has an estimated $300 million in annual revenue….
Google executives have privately fretted for years that the company's decision to censor the search results on google.cn, to filter out topics banned by Chinese censors, was out of sync with the company's official motto, "Don't be evil."
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