Google's China Problem

Wraithfighter writes "The New York Times has a rather lengthy, but informative, piece on the origins of Google's current Chinese search engine, as well as a very informative look at how censoring is actually done in China. From the article: 'Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information? In America, that seems like an intolerable question -- the end of the conversation. But in China, as Google has discovered, it is just the beginning.'"

Google/China Relationship

[uglysad]

Google is not "censoring" the chinese.

These websites are blocked in china anyways, so instead of having the first 3 or 4 pages of results blocked, google removed the results do delivery more accurate search results. Google isn't censoring the internet for the chinese, they are optimizing it.

Re:Communism is a technicality

[Confused]

One thing that irritates me about this whole debate is the implicit assumption that China being Communist is just a technicality and not a big huge mega problem. People just pretend that the issue isn't there and just hope it will go away if they put their blinders on. They just go about "trying to do the best they can" while completely ignoring the nature of the big ugly hideous beast breating down their throat.

Having some experience with eastern European countries during their communist regime, I can tell you it really is just a technicality for day to day live.

On one hand, people first and foremost are interested to live in peace and comfort and want to see their children doing the same. If they can achieve this, the philosophical aspects of the current emperor of the land is of no importance. On the other hand, if they can't they will damn whatever emperor makes their live miserable and at some point will seek to improve their lot by exchanging emperor.

For the less philosophical level this means: If you starve or are terrorised by the killer squads, you don't give shit about if those responsible are brandishing little red books or are the stoutest supporters of free capitalism.

This all leads to the simple conclusion, that communism (as much as capitalism or all other -isms) are just minor technicalities only mostly happy people with nothing better to do can worry about.

the tank man

[rchatterjee]

A recent PBS|Frontline documentary covered how the Chinese government has gone about censoring one major event from its past including on the internet, it's free to view online:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/ [pbs.org]

Re:Communism is a technicality

[argoff]

This all leads to the simple conclusion, that communism (as much as capitalism or all other -isms) are just minor technicalities only mostly happy people with nothing better to do can worry about.

Philosophies like "statisim" and "libertarinisim" are not just some nice little philosophies that sit on the clouds. They involve belief systems, and these belief systems lead to chioces, and these choices have conesquences. If people don't care, it is only to the extent that they don't realise the consequences of their choices. Do the leaders at google, yahoo, and cisco really understand the consequences of their choices other then beyond the next quarterly report? It sure seems like they don't care, which means that we as customers must - or else.

Censorship not just in China

[danratherfoe]

Not only is google participating in censorship in China, they are also involved in some activities in the U.S. which are disquieting. For example, they have been documented (see link http://www.infowars.com/articles/sept11/sheen_goog le_censoring_story_again.htm [infowars.com] on at least two occasions not indexing important alternative news stories, such as the one on Charlie Sheen's 9/11 comments above. Insomuch as they fail to index an important story which has been heavily visited and linked to, it is clear that they are engaging in de-facto censorship.

censoring is not the real problem

[WindBourne]

Censoring is a red-herring. If the citizens can not get to the info, then Google is only focused on what they can get to. In addition, Google notifies them that it is censored, where MS and Yahoo do not even bother.

The real problem is the use of the services for finding and punishing citizens. Microsoft and Yahoo have been turning over any and all information to govs. with a glee in their eye and $ in the checkbook. In fact, in the most recent episode, Yahoo turned over a DRAFT of an e-mail. This is not something that went out to the general public. It was not used anywhere. It was simply thoughts that are now being used against ppl. Yahoo/Microsoft will hang their head while crossing their fingers and winking their eye.

In contrast, Google has so far fought against American Gov ( and other govs. including chinese) about releasing any information that can be used in this way. Google did release info concerning ONLY child porn, but nothing that allowed a witch hunt by our admin. And so far, it does not appear that Google is releasing info about what individuals do.

But I have to wonder, how soon before Google does turn evil and starts releasing. Once they do, they will be heading down a very slippery and steep slope, that will force them to join the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, Enron, etc. in names that are now synonymous with evil.

Re:Communisim is not a technicality

[liangzai]

Communism is the dictatorial power of the people through a proletarian revolution. There never was a proletarian revolution in China, for the simple reason China didn't have a proletariat. The revolution in China was agrarian, and the system implemented was Maoism, which isn't anywhere near communism except for the fact that the state took over all the private property.

Since 1978 China is essentially a state-capitalist dictatorship with local (and primitive) democracy, with remaining socialism only on the countryside (state-owned farms leased to farmers). The state-owned property has largely been returned to private interests, and nowhere in the world will you find as many privately owned businesses as in China.

China of today is communist only by name, and this won't change because the party needs to pretend it is implementing "socialism with Chinese characteristics" instead of capitalism, because the party was founded on a Marxist-Leninist basis.

China of today is thus as much communist as North Korea is democratic ("People's Democratic Republic of Korea") or East Germany was democratic ("Deutsche Democratische Republik"). Why is this so incredibly hard for Americans to understand?

Please repeat after me: China is a state-capitalist dictatorship. There you go! Now when you know the basics, perhaps you will be able to discuss the problems of China with some more credibility.

Not just apathetic

[Nazmun]

I've got a an extremely smart female chinese friend who goes to MIT. We agree on most things in life but the one thing we totally disagree on (I used get slightly fumed about it) is that she supports her government fully. "The chinese population is far larger", "You need a government like this", "It's run more efficiently and there is less fighting in the government", are things you'd here from her.

I am far from being in agreement but I can after a year almost come to an understanding of why she feels this way. I was initially surprised as she did move here during about middle school.

Google: "at the top", Yahoo: "a sellout"

[Froomb]

From TFA:

I expected [famed political blogger] Zhao [Jing] to be much angrier with the American Internet companies than he was. He was surprisingly philosophical. He ranked the companies in order of ethics, ticking them off with his fingers. Google, he said, was at the top of the pile. It was genuinely improving the quality of Chinese information and trying to do its best within a bad system. . . . Yahoo came last, and Zhao had nothing but venom for the company.

"Google has struck a compromise," he said, and compromises are sometimes necessary. Yahoo's behavior, he added, put it in a different category: "Yahoo is a sellout. Chinese people hate Yahoo." The difference, Zhao said, was that Yahoo had put individual dissidents in serious danger and done so apparently without thinking much about the human damage.

A useful perspective from one of the internet celebrities in China. I hope Yahoo appreciates all the good publicity its actions in China are garnering.

censorship censored

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone note that a feature of the censorship system itself is that the censored system is not accessible from the outside. So the censorship is not visible (=censored) to visitors outside china: this goes both ways and prevents an evaluation of the censorship itself. If you try to access google.cn from outside china, back you are to google.com. Smart, really.

Re:Google/China Relationship

[hey]

They should list the banned sites but with an icon (eg person with blindfold) beside them.

Ideals...

[Sj0]

American Ideals and American reality are two different things. It's easy to say "Censorship in all forms is wrong", but as we see on this site on a regular basis, just because a nation has an ideal doesn't mean it will live up to them when push comes to shove.

Google in China can't display results about democracy. Google in America can't display results about Scientology. Same shit, different pile.

Re:Not just apathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

Has it occurred to you that the Chinese people who have the money to move to the U.S. are probably doing pretty well? The poor people who can't afford to move probably have a very different opinion. A few months ago, I believe, there was some video smuggled out of China. It was of farmers violently being removed from their land. They would certainly disagree with your friend's opinion of the Chinese government. When you are a-ok, it's true that you don't care about who or what your government is. But in a democratic system, WHEN things go wrong for you, there is at least a means for peacefully having your voice heard. The Chinese don't have that luxury.

Re:Not just apathetic

[dfjghsk]

did it ever occur to you that she feels that way because she does not have to live under the Chinese government?

It's all the same to her:
1) she isn't being persecuted by the U.S. gov.
2) she isn't being persecuted by the Chinese gov.

Of course, 2 is only because she (and her family) had the money to leave.

In China things are certainly different. There is a large (and growing) number of people who are upset with their government:

Number of mass protests in China:
2004: 74,000 [washingtonpost.com]
2005: 80,000 [washingtonpost.com]

And these are official numbers.. released by the Chinese government. Feel free to lookup numbers for the past several years.. you'll see the number of protests are growing each year.

So who are the protesters? Almost all of them are Peasants. Those who are the poorest, also happen to have the fewest rights.

So ask yourself: when was the last time you saw that many protests in the U.S.? When was the last time you saw the poor protesting because of their treatment?

Yeah, it's all the same to her..... as long as she doesn't have to live there.

Re:right, because the US is so great

[dracocat]

I'll try to bring this full circle back to point. I think you prove exactly how the United States laws and freedom to print information actually work.

If information was actually controlled we would all be talking about the tremendous amounts of WMD found in Iraq right now, instead of criticizing the adminitration about lying to us.

Yes you say there are some people who believe they are there. I believe you are talking about the same percentages of people who believe we never landed on the moon. I can't say this for sure because searching for the last while didn't reveal any signifigant numbers of people who believe this.

Call me an optimist, but I say the system in the U.S. works, not that it is broken.

I imagine a similar situation if it happened in China would never be discovered.

Why did it take so long for this misinformation about WMD existing in Iraq to be revealed? This was a more unique case because even the parties disseminating the information did not know its truth or untruth. Only later would anybody know if what was being said or not was true, including the people saying it. I would venture to say the public as a whole discovered there was no WMD about the time that Bush did.

That is what the first ammendment does. And it is those principles that Google is completely ignoring. Some may say its best to have a partial Google rather than no Google at all. This statement, perhaps like the previous discussion can only be proven through time. Their contribution to the rights of Chinese citizens may well turn out to be one of a positive character. Again, only looking back can we have any reasonable authority of which to judge.

Here's a thought - this'll screw the chinese govt.

[thewils]

Like quite a few people on /. I own a domain, and manage a few websites. Because China prevents connections to certain websites, how about if the webmasters of the world somehow got themselves organised and were able to mirror some of the censored content on their website for a period of time. Then at some pre-arranged signal (I'm thinking of the lighting of the Olympic flame in Beijing in 2008 here) everyone switches their home page over to a new one where banned chinese information (pictures, words) is prominent. Also included, could be a couple of links to other sites hosting similar material aka a webring. The point being that up until the lighting of the flame, no information is available, but once the flame is lit then the whole web "lights up" with banned information. It would be impossible for the chinese to censor all these websites, even during the time that the Olympics occurs.

Somehow, a register should be set up of content providers and hosters, anyone registering for content hosting would not know of anyone else - the whole thing would be secret - and the register would allot content to hosters so that the whole thing is multiply redundant. Finally, the whole effort should be overseen by someone respectable who can report if things are going OK or if there's a shortage in any particular area.

There's a couple of years yet until 2008, should be enough time for a mature discussion and ample time to develop a co-ordinating website and distribute the required content.

Thoughts anyone?