Google stops censoring in ChinaFollow

A story link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/23/AR2010032302487.html

A major sea change with western businesses no longer enforcing repressive rules or a minor tiff in an otherwise cozy relationship?

For those of you following China more closely then I do: is this a sign of a more repressive China, or really nothing has changed?

I can't imagine a more open ended commitment then censoring undesirable content. In the case of China, this could be virtually anything. At that point, the company is an arm of government. Although it may have seemed reasonable at the beginning, with some admittedly large collection of filtered terms, the ease with which people route around censorship by inventing new terms (take a look at drug terms) must mean this operation grew exponentially. And now the Chinese government seems to be censoring themselves - which is likely what they should have done all along (assuming, of course, they are going down this bad road to begin with).

Only because internal elections are coming. I think China is pretty stable overall.

It was a good move by Google, if not necessarily for them.

The Chinese people can't, but the Chinese members of the Communsit Party can. Well, that's not 100% true because there are some forms of limited local elections in China, in certain areas, but it's so limited that it doesn't affect anything. But the elections of a new leader within the Communist party does make a small difference. There are lots of internal tensions, posturing and struggles going on inside the party, which obviously has an effect on policy.

Fundamentally, though, the issue is not really China. They haven't changed their stance, they want a censored version of the internet and they will only do business on those terms. It's Google who changed the game by refusing to play by those rules. They did the 180 turn. Which is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but if there's any "news" in this story it's the Google change of heart, not the censorship of China.

Yeah, but I'm not sure it signals anything new. China has always been pretty good at stealing secrets, and they've certainly made the most of the internet as a spying and hacking device. Maybe what we're seeing is them flexing their muscle, being more assertive and confident, but I think that's just their PR, rather any internal instability. I might be wrong though, I'm not an expert China watcher. But it seems roughly as stable as an emerging superpower with over a billion people can be.

Compared to India?

Maybe.

I wanted to start editing posts so they censored the word china and replaced it with google, but that would have been confusing even for me.