In 2000, Google established its first Chinese language search engine based out of the United States. As a pre-condition, the Chinese government installed a firewall on the search engine, blocking search results for such terms as “Tiananmen Square,” and “Taiwanese Independence,” with which Google and Yahoo complied. Among other internet favorites to be censored were online “pornography, gambling, and most issues relating to democracy,” said CJN professor Micky Lee.

Suffolk’s Asian Studies Program hosted a round table discussion on the controversy which was headed up by a three-person panel of Suffolk Professors: Lee spoke on the media aspect of Google’s situation. Chris Westfall of Education and Human Services discussed the economic side of the controversy, and Yong Xue from Suffolk’s History Department took up the Chinese position of the argument, having lived in China.

At the heart of the controversy is Google’s poor Chinese market share and its conflict with the Chinese government over censorship and hacking.

By 2005, Google had established a full Chinese branch of Google called Google China that worked with the government to adhere to its censorship requirements. Similar, if not more stringent, censorship regulations were placed on Yahoo. The government made it mandatory that everyone use their real names as email addresses, which led directly to the arrest of two Chinese Political activists. At this point ,red flags went up in the United States and abroad but the U.S. government cannot ask private corporations to disclose the nature of their relationships with foreign countries.

“The Chinese aren’t trying to protect their citizens, they are trying to restrict damaging political information,” said Westfall.
Google continued to comply with censorship regulations until late 2009 when the uneasy arrangement came to a head. A hacker that is still unidentified, largely believed to be from the Chinese government, hacked Google’s Gmail server, “something only a very sophisticated hacker could do,” said Lee. The accounts that were hacked on Google’s server belonged to four Chinese Political Dissidents, who as a result were compromised and pursued by the Chinese Government.

“Who else would want the email of political dissidents other than the government?”

Google first threatened to leave China altogether, then revised its threat to the un-censoring of search results on its search engine. Google hasn’t acted on either threat, which was a major point of discussion. Google had been violated, “its CEO’s were appalled someone had broke into their house,” said Westfall.

The U.S. government said that Google China had “compromised the freedom of the internet,” which raised questions as to why Google didn’t act on its threats. Because of Google’s weak 13 percent market share, “the Chinese feel that Google is having a temper tantrum. They aren’t making the money they expected and other Chinese search engines have very similar formats. In addition, they have made threats and yet still comply with censors,” said Westfall.

“Google knew what it was getting into as far as censorship when it came to China,” said Xue. “Censorship was even worse in China before Google came. It has improved. Chinese people aren’t convinced that Google is truly concerned about privacy and that Google isn’t trying to politicize the issue to save face in light of their minute market share.”

Lee elaborated saying, “most Chinese don’t care about censorship, and they aren’t online for political dissent. They want to shop and play games on the internet. Chinese people have a hard time believing that Google is morally outraged.”
The question is whether Google is trying to address privacy and human rights issues in China or whether it’s trying to politicize these issues to direct attention away from its poor performance in its large-scale operation.

“China recently led the world out of recession,” said Xue. “Why is Washington choosing now to take China to task about privacy? This is the worst time to try to change China.”