as you may have heard, google has decided to leave china. i was wondering, does this affect hk also? another question, does the great firewall of china include hk or no?

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/17/china.google/

I don't think they're "leaving china" ... I think they're just threatening to stop providing chinese-centric services on the .cn domain.  

I'm guessing there's a load of stuff behind the scenes, like agreeing to censor falun gong etc. on Chinese-located searches, so what they're really threatening is to back out of previous commitments already given unless the govt respects the non-china business of google as being none of the chinese govt's business.  

Fact is google have a security problem anyway, which they need to fix as best they can: if the PRC can hack in, so can anyone else.  

So they're not really trying to stop the security breaches, they're just using the spying as political capital to highlight the various favours they've already done.  

.hk is a sovereign domain and is (so far as we know) not subject to the censorship of the Great Firewall of China, so it'll be outside the 'threat' topull out.

i dont think hk censorship is same as china. 2 separate worlds in my opinion. i think google just making threats cuz they want more control but china dont allow it

i doubt google is leaving china yet. they just release the filter restrictions. i don't think are they seriously pulling out.
maybe it's threat to make china reconsider the business needs.

Rumours say that Google is pulling out because they are not able to compete with the chinese BaiDu.
and Google thus need a face saving way to pull out of China.

Spies infiltrated Google China.

Sometimes I wonder if free trade with china is dangerous and disadvantagious. They restrict imports while exporting wildly after copying and parasiting western cooperators.

to be fair, u cant say they are just copying and parasiting western stuff. ask yourself about how many western companies exploit china because of the labour cost? its western company's own doing, not china's fault? if china did not allow such companies to get stuff made in china, u would be paying double or triple what you pay now for many goods.

they restrict import because they dont need to import more expensive stuff when they can do it in house for a lot cheaper.

so i dont get the complaint?

China IS playing an incredibly dangerous game, ie loaning money for people to buy its stuff, in that the USA can kill China by declaring old USD unacceptable, this would cause strife in the US for a fee years but it would recover.

China has also been playing a tech game, anything that gets moved tehre gets copied, when VW moved their plant there th PRC government almost booted them out as they were only using them to build older models.

Yes and no - I think the key to China's game is it doesn't really care about wealth anywhere near as much as it cares about power and control.  There's a Chinese proverb [flamesuit on in case I get it wrong!] that you can only control something if you can kill it.  

Obviously the US could write off / devalue its currency, but only by committing geo-political harakiri in the process.  

By building a dominant position in world trade it's simultaneously gaining a massive industrial infrastructure (paid for with US debt) and undercutting any potential competitor in the second or third world.  

Does it care about the wealth and welfare of its own citizens?  Well, this news article "Villagers Search for Deadly Rocket Debris" pretty much sums up that they don't:-
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/ ... ss=China&s=News

at least, compared to world power, enriching their citizens comes a very distant second ... and if in the process they can convert some of the debt by buying up natural resources in third world countries, so much the better ...

So I don't think they actually care what the US does with the dollar.  They want the IOUs for the power it gives, not for physical wealth it represents.  

Apropos there was a graft case a while back, where a gangster lent a small sum of money to a US senator (something like $15k or maybe even less), the senator defaulted on the loan, and the shark never collected.  When interviewed and asked why he didn't enforce the loan, he said "for $15k I can own a US senator, why would I want to collect?" ... clearly power matters more than money, even in the 'land of the free' ...

[ Last edited by  DArtagnan at 19-1-2010 16:40 ]

Like all major corporations, Google cannot afford to pull out of china.
Maybe its not making money there now but the future potential is just too big to miss out on.
VW got their foot in the door early on and are now raking it in.

I've heard a lot of people saying Google is losing in China, as if they want to cut their losses.

Baidu and G have 90% market share, with 60% going to Baidu. So in 3 years google have gained a third of the market, triple all other local and international engines combined, besides CCP's best friends at Baidu.

Unlike Facebook, if Google can't operate in China our comrades will start asking questions, and G already gave the answer... Your government hacked our system

man, they ll be back, some time or another

I see in the news where people putting flowers in google asia offices front door. I guess some people r pretty passionate about google in asia! haha

^^ yeah, i saw pictures of that too! i didnt really know what to make of it though, looked like they were putting flowers on a grave

china holds $2.5 trillion dollars of US currency. Yes you read that accurately, that's almost the size of the US deficit. So if the US were ever going to devalue their currency or declare old USD unacceptable, then there would be a lot of political ramifications. Given that China is going to have 40 million more males in the next 10 years, I can see China using that as an excuse to wage an all out war on the US for defaulting on the loan. First, China is showing its strength if the US were ever thinking about doing that, secondly, they can get rid of some of the males that are roaming the land doing nothing. It's a win-win for China and I am pretty sure the US knows that China is  holding their nuts like a vice grip right now. Nothing they can do about it. That is not a small sum of money even to a country like China. People kill other people for $5 bucks. Think how much 2.5 trillion dollars is?

Yes, it's true that US owns China alot of money, that's why US has to be polite to China and not everyone else, but still China isn't going to declare war on the US, it has too much to lose, to do that. But there might be war on the US when China believes that they have a right to Tawain, and the US doesn't agree, elsewise, it's going to be all peacefull...

But back on topic, well, I believe that Google should leave the Chinese market, because Google's principle or mission is to create a database of information and allow the public access to it, and not just to a portion of the information, but all of it...

But then, can Google afford to leave China?

But we all know the old saying - "if you owe the bank $1M, you're in trouble; if you owe the bank $100M, the bank's in trouble."  

If China holds $2.5 trillion dollars of US currency, it could be in a lot of trouble.  

Pisser I agree with you on that.

DA'T, you quote some punk saying; "for $15k I can own a US senator, why would I want to collect?"  IMO that is just BS, if you get to make a US Senator your bitch it will cost way, way, more than that .... those guys are really "ethical" and would look down their noses at anything less than US$ 6 figures or even 1M+. Unless maybe the punk had the video of the Senator with a US$10k whore then it might be viable.

It's naive to think that ANY major world Government does not have the ability to explore the electronic capabilities to look at what anyone is doing in the cyber world ....  if you are on their radar?

Some of you guys are focussed too locally, China fixes its exchange rate (linked to the US$) and will from time to time adjust it. The US currency "floats" so the world's markets decide the exchange rate, and I hate to burst your bubble but right now China is still a relatively mid level world economy, something close to US$5T pa. China should overtake Japan this year and be US$5T+ in 2010. The US is circa US$14T, and Europe about the same. You have to relate this to population to get the real economy comparison, the US controls 25% of the world's economy with a population of around 308M.

Sure the US is running huge debts for its internal private consumption and military/campaigns but ALL USA foreign debt is in US$. The markets have already been devaluing the US$ significantly but this also reduces the US' debt in real terms. Many economists are predicting we will be experiencing high inflation in the West within the next two years+ as the US debt causes the markets to "naturally" adjust.

google thinks they can make the Chinese government back off their one state party  hard line attitude and yield to the american company. I doubt the Chinese government cares whether google stays or leaves. If they stay, they better play by the Chinese rules but google threatening to leave China is not gonna make the Chinese government change their mind.

Yeah I agree.

IMO Google's mission is something to be applauded, but I understand that is just something the Chinese Gov cannot live with (right or wrong). I hope that changes some day but I know it would be a huge shift from the current situation, take decades, and be a "generational" change.

Google should hold true to its ideals and just leave China until, and if, the time when China can accept Google for what it is.

Google's philosophy is quite different and ethical compared to the common big US corporations and should not be lumped in with them. For example a company like Coca Cola which just wants more customers drinking their products, many of which are known to be just high sugar, or dubious "sweetener", junk products. Coke doesn't really care for their consumers other than the mighty dollar and profit.