The art of censoring without censoring
China doesn't like its people getting access to information on the Internet that is uncensored by the state. Nothing ruins the illusion of a socialist paradise more than seeing how much better things could be, or indeed how much better off than you many of your countrymen are.
Google, on the other hand, doesn't want to be seen to collude with China on censorship, which is why it created the workaround of redirecting all google.cn traffic to google.com.hk, where the degree of censorship is much lighter.
Now, according to a new blog post from Google chief legal officer David Drummond, China has decided it's not happy with this workaround and is threatening to not renews Google's Internet content provider licence at the end of this month unless a more acceptable compromise is found. If that happens, Google ceases to exist in China.
So here's what Google is doing: it's creating a landing page on google.cn that offers a link to google.com.hk. In other words it's a voluntary rather than automatic redirect. As far as Google is concerned, this still delivers on its pledge to not to censor results on Google.cn, but surely it must be doing just that in order to placate the Chinese state.
"As a company we aspire to make information available to users everywhere, including China," blogged Drummond. "It's why we have worked so hard to keep Google.cn alive, as well as to continue our research and development work in China. This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self censor and, we believe, with local law. We are therefore hopeful that our license will be renewed on this basis so we can continue to offer our Chinese users services via Google.cn."
We guess we'll all find out in a couple of days.
