[Infowarrior] - Google in China: The Big Disconnect

[Richard Forno]

April 23, 2006
Google in China: The Big Disconnect
By CLIVE THOMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html?pagewanted=print

(This article is a preview of this weekend's Times magazine.)

For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the
level of a movie star like Edison Chen or the singers in the boy band F4,
but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber
dark suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations
for Google in China, gave a lecture at one Chinese university about how
young Chinese should compete with the rest of the world, scalpers sold
tickets for $60 apiece. At another, an audience of 8,000 showed up; students
sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word.

It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China's high-tech
youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon and is
fluent in both English and Mandarin. Before joining Google last year, he
worked for Apple in California and then for Microsoft in China; he set up
Microsoft Research Asia, the company's research-and-development lab in
Beijing. In person, Lee exudes the cheery optimism of a life coach; last
year, he published "Be Your Personal Best," a fast-selling self-help book
that urged Chinese students to adopt the risk-taking spirit of American
capitalism. When he started the Microsoft lab seven years ago, he hired
dozens of China's top graduates; he will now be doing the same thing for
Google. "The students of China are remarkable," he told me when I met him in
Beijing in February. "There is a huge desire to learn."

Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of
technology. The Internet, he says, will level the playing field for China's
enormous rural underclass; once the country's small villages are connected,
he says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able
to access online course materials from M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate
themselves. Lee has been with Google since only last summer, but he wears
the company's earnest, utopian ethos on his sleeve: when he was hired away
from Microsoft, he published a gushingly emotional open letter on his
personal Web site, praising Google's mission to bring information to the
masses. He concluded with an exuberant equation that translates as "youth +
freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation + user focus + don't be evil = The
Miracle of Google."

When I visited with Lee, that miracle was being conducted out of a
collection of bland offices in downtown Beijing that looked as if they had
been hastily rented and occupied. The small rooms were full of eager young
Chinese men in hip sweatshirts clustered around enormous flat-panel
monitors, debugging code for new Google projects. "The ideals that we uphold
here are really just so important and noble," Lee told me. "How to build
stuff that users like, and figure out how to make money later. And 'Don't Do
Evil' " ‹ he was referring to Google's bold motto, "Don't Be Evil" ‹ "all of
those things. I think I've always been an idealist in my heart."

Yet Google's conduct in China has in recent months seemed considerably less
than idealistic. In January, a few months after Lee opened the Beijing
office, the company announced it would be introducing a new version of its
search engine for the Chinese market. To obey China's censorship laws,
Google's representatives explained, the company had agreed to purge its
search results of any Web sites disapproved of by the Chinese government,
including Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a government-banned spiritual
movement; sites promoting free speech in China; or any mention of the 1989
Tiananmen Square massacre. If you search for "Tibet" or "Falun Gong" most
anywhere in the world on google.com, you'll find thousands of blog entries,
news items and chat rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same search inside
China on google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone.
Google will have erased them completely.

Google's decision did not go over well in the United States. In February,
company executives were called into Congressional hearings and compared to
Nazi collaborators. The company's stock fell, and protesters waved placards
outside the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google wasn't
the only American high-tech company to run aground in China in recent
months, nor was it the worst offender. But Google's executives were supposed
to be cut from a different cloth. When the company went public two years
ago, its telegenic young founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, wrote in the
company's official filing for the Securities and Exchange Commission that
Google is "a company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good."
How could Google square that with making nice with a repressive Chinese
regime and the Communist Party behind it?

It was difficult for me to know exactly how Lee felt about the company's
arrangement with China's authoritarian leadership. As a condition of our
meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government
relations; only the executives in Google's California head office were
allowed to discuss those matters. But as Lee and I talked about how the
Internet was transforming China, he offered one opinion that seemed telling:
the Chinese students he meets and employs, Lee said, do not hunger for
democracy. "People are actually quite free to talk about the subject," he
added, meaning democracy and human rights in China. "I don't think they care
that much. I think people would say: 'Hey, U.S. democracy, that's a good
form of government. Chinese government, good and stable, that's a good form
of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see
my friends, live happily.' " Certainly, he said, the idea of personal
expression, of speaking out publicly, had become vastly more popular among
young Chinese as the Internet had grown and as blogging and online chat had
become widespread. "But I don't think of this as a political statement at
all," Lee said. "I think it's more people finding that they can express
themselves and be heard, and they love to keep doing that."

It sounded to me like company spin ‹ a curiously deflated notion of free
speech. But spend some time among China's nascent class of Internet users,
as I have these past months, and you begin to hear such talk somewhat
differently. Youth + freedom + equality + don't be evil is an equation with
few constants and many possible solutions. What is freedom, just now, to the
Chinese? 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.

Cultural Differences

Google was not, in fact, a pioneer in China. Yahoo was the first major
American Internet company to enter the market, introducing a
Chinese-language version of its site and opening up an office in Beijing in
1999. Yahoo executives quickly learned how difficult China was to penetrate
‹ and how baffling the country's cultural barriers can be for Americans.
Chinese businesspeople, for example, rarely rely on e-mail, because they
find the idea of leaving messages to be socially awkward. They prefer live
exchanges, which means they gravitate to mobile phones and short text
messages instead. (They avoid voicemail for the same reason; during the
weeks I traveled in China, whenever I called a Chinese executive whose phone
was turned off, I would get a recording saying that the person was simply
"unavailable," and the phone would not accept messages.) The most popular
feature of the Internet for Chinese users ‹ much more so than in the United
States ‹ is the online discussion board, where long, rollicking arguments
and flame wars spill on for thousands of comments. Baidu, a Chinese search
engine that was introduced in 2001 as an early competitor to Yahoo,
capitalized on the national fervor for chat and invented a tool that allows
people to create instant discussion groups based on popular search queries.
When users now search on baidu.com for the name of the Chinese N.B.A. star
Yao Ming, for example, they are shown not only links to news reports on his
games; they are also able to join a chat room with thousands of others and
argue about him. Baidu's chat rooms receive as many as five million posts a
day.

As Yahoo found, these cultural nuances made the sites run by American
companies feel simply foreign to Chinese users ‹ and drove them instead to
local portals designed by Chinese entrepreneurs. These sites, including
Sina.com and Sohu.com, had less useful search engines, but they were full of
links to chat rooms and government-approved Chinese-language news sites.
Nationalist feelings might have played a role, too, in the success
Chinese-run sites enjoyed at Yahoo's expense. "There's now a very strong
sense of pride in supporting the local guy," I was told by Andrew Lih, a
Chinese-American professor of media studies at the University of Hong Kong.

Yahoo also was slow to tap into another powerful force in Chinese life:
rampant piracy. In most parts of the West, after the Napster wars, movie and
music piracy is increasingly understood as an illicit activity; it thrives,
certainly, but there is now a stigma against taking too much intellectual
content without paying for it. (Hence the success of iTunes.) In China,
downloading illegal copies of music, movies and software is as normal and
accepted as checking the weather online. Baidu's executives discovered early
on that many young users were using the Internet to hunt for pirated MP3's,
so the company developed an easy-to-use interface specifically for this
purpose. When I sat in an Internet cafe in Beijing one afternoon, a teenager
with mutton-chop sideburns a few chairs over from me sipped a Coke and
watched a samurai movie he'd downloaded free, while his friends used Baidu
to find and pull down pirated tracks from the 50 Cent album "Get Rich or Die
Tryin'." Almost one-fifth of Baidu's traffic comes from searching for
unlicensed MP3's that would be illegal in the United States. Robin Li,
Baidu's 37-year-old founder and C.E.O., is unrepentant. "Right now I think
that the record companies may not be happy about the service we are
offering," he told me recently, "but I think digital music as a trend is
unstoppable."

At first, Google took a different approach to the Chinese market than Yahoo
did. In early 2000, Google's engineers quietly set about creating a version
of their search engine that could understand character-based Asian languages
like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. By the end of the year, they had put up a
clunky but serviceable Chinese-language version of Google's home page. If
you were in China and surfed over to google.com in 2001, Google's servers
would automatically detect that you were inside the country and send you to
the Chinese-language search interface, much in the same way google.com
serves up a French-language interface to users in France.

While Baidu appealed to young MP3 hunters, Google became popular with a
different set: white-collar urban professionals in the major Chinese cities,
aspirational types who follow Western styles and sprinkle English words into
conversation, a class that prides itself on being cosmopolitan rather than
nationalistic. By pulling in that audience, Google by the end of 2002
achieved a level of success that had eluded Yahoo: it amassed an estimated
25 percent of all search traffic in China ‹ and it did so working entirely
from California, far outside the Chinese government's sphere of influence.

The Great Firewall

Then on Sept. 3, 2002, Google vanished. Chinese workers arrived at their
desks to find that Google's site was down, with just an error page in its
place. The Chinese government had begun blocking it. China has two main
methods for censoring the Web. For companies inside its borders, the
government uses a broad array of penalties and threats to keep content
clean. For Web sites that originate anywhere else in the world, the
government has another impressively effective mechanism of control: what
techies call the Great Firewall of China.

When you use the Internet, it often feels placeless and virtual, but it's
not. It runs on real wires that cut through real geographical boundaries.
There are three main fiber-optic pipelines in China, giant underground
cables that provide Internet access for the public and connect China to the
rest of the Internet outside its borders. The Chinese government requires
the private-sector companies that run these fiber-optic networks to
specially configure "router" switches at the edge of the network, where
signals cross into foreign countries. These routers ‹ some of which are made
by Cisco Systems, an American firm ‹ serve as China's new censors.

If you log onto a computer in downtown Beijing and try to access a Web site
hosted on a server in Chicago, your Internet browser sends out a request for
that specific Web page. The request travels over one of the Chinese
pipelines until it hits the routers at the border, where it is then
examined. If the request is for a site that is on the government's blacklist
‹ and there are lots of them ‹ it won't get through. If the site isn't
blocked wholesale, the routers then examine the words in the requested
page's Internet address for blacklisted terms. If the address contains a
word like "falun" or even a coded term like "198964" (which Chinese
dissidents use to signify June 4, 1989, the date of the Tiananmen Square
massacre), the router will block the signal. Back in the Internet cafe, your
browser will display an error message. The filters can be surprisingly
sophisticated, allowing certain pages from a site to slip through while
blocking others. While I sat at one Internet cafe in Beijing, the
government's filters allowed me to surf the entertainment and sports pages
of the BBC but not its news section.

Google posed a unique problem for the censors: Because the company had no
office at the time inside the country, the Chinese government had no legal
authority over it ‹ no ability to demand that Google voluntarily withhold
its search results from Chinese users. And the firewall only half-worked in
Google's case: it could block sites that Google pointed to, but in some
cases it would let slip through a list of search results that included
banned sites. So if you were in Shanghai and you searched for "human rights
in China" on google.com, you would get a list of search results that
included Human Rights in China (hrichina.org), a New York-based organization
whose Web site is banned by the Chinese government. But if you tried to
follow the link to hrichina.org, you would get nothing but an error message;
the firewall would block the page. You could see that the banned sites
existed, in other words, but you couldn't reach them. Government officials
didn't like this situation ‹ Chinese citizens were receiving constant
reminders that their leaders felt threatened by certain subjects ‹ but
Google was popular enough that they were reluctant to block it entirely.

In 2002, though, something changed, and the Chinese government decided to
shut down all access to Google. Why? Theories abound. Sergey Brin, the
co-founder of Google, whose responsibilities include government relations,
told me that he suspects the block might have been at the instigation of a
competitor ‹ one of its Chinese rivals. Brin is too diplomatic to accuse
anyone by name, but various American Internet executives told me they
believe that Baidu has at times benefited from covert government
intervention. A young Chinese-American entrepreneur in Beijing told me that
she had heard that the instigator of the Google blockade was Baidu, which in
2002 had less than 3 percent of the search market compared with Google's 24
percent. "Basically, some Baidu people sat down and did hundreds of searches
for banned materials on Google," she said. (Like many Internet
businesspeople I spoke with in China, she asked to remain anonymous, fearing
retribution from the authorities.) "Then they took all the results, printed
them up and went to the government and said, 'Look at all this bad stuff you
can find on Google!' That's why the government took Google offline." Baidu
strongly denies the charge, and when I spoke to Guo Liang, a professor at
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, he dismissed the idea and
argued that Baidu is simply a stronger competitor than Google, with a better
grasp of Chinese desires. Still, many Beijing high-tech insiders told me
that it is common for domestic Internet firms to complain to the government
about the illicit content of competitors, in the hope that their rivals will
suffer the consequences. In China, the censorship regime is not only a
political tool; it is also a competitive one ‹ a cudgel that private firms
use to beat one another with.

Self-Discipline Awards

When I visited a dingy Internet cafe one November evening in Beijing, its
120 or so cubicles were crammed with teenagers. (Because computers and home
Internet connections are so expensive, many of China's mostly young Internet
users go online in these cafes, which charge mere pennies per hour and
provide fast broadband ‹ and cold soft drinks.) Everyone in the cafe looked
to be settled in for a long evening of lightweight entertainment: young
girls in pink and yellow Hello Kitty sweaters juggled multiple chat
sessions, while upstairs a gang of young Chinese soldiers in olive-drab
coats laughed as they crossed swords in the medieval fantasy game World of
Warcraft. On one wall, next to a faded kung-fu movie poster, was a yellow
sign that said, in Chinese characters, "Do not go to pornographic or illegal
Web sites." The warning seemed almost beside the point; nobody here looked
even remotely likely to be hunting for banned Tiananmen Square
retrospectives. I asked the cafe manager, a man with huge aviator glasses
and graying hair, how often his clients try to view illegal content. Not
often, he said with a chuckle, and when they do, it's usually pornography.
He said he figured it was the government's job to keep banned materials
inaccessible. "If it's not supposed to be seen," he said, "it's not supposed
to be seen."

One mistake Westerners frequently make about China is to assume that the
government is furtive about its censorship. On the contrary, the party is
quite matter of fact about it ‹ proud, even. One American businessman who
would speak only anonymously told me the story of attending an award
ceremony last year held by the Internet Society of China for Internet firms,
including the major Internet service providers. "I'm sitting there in the
audience for this thing," he recounted, "and they say, 'And now it's time to
award our annual Self-Discipline Awards!' And they gave 10 companies an
award. They gave them a plaque. They shook hands. The minister was there; he
took his picture with each guy. It was basically like Excellence in
Self-Censorship ‹ and everybody in the audience is, like, clapping."
Internet censorship in China, this businessman explained, is presented as a
benevolent police function. In January, the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau
created two cuddly little anime-style cartoon "Internet Police" mascots
named "Jingjing" and "Chacha"; each cybercop has a blog and a chat window
where Chinese citizens can talk to them. As a Shenzhen official candidly
told The Beijing Youth Daily, "The main function of Jingjing and Chacha is
to intimidate." The article went on to explain that the characters are there
"to publicly remind all Netizens to be conscious of safe and healthy use of
the Internet, self-regulate their online behavior and maintain harmonious
Internet order together."

Intimidation and "self-regulation" are, in fact, critical to how the party
communicates its censorship rules to private-sector Internet companies. To
be permitted to offer Internet services, a private company must sign a
license agreeing not to circulate content on certain subjects, including
material that "damages the honor or interests of the state" or "disturbs the
public order or destroys public stability" or even "infringes upon national
customs and habits." One prohibition specifically targets "evil cults or
superstition," a clear reference to Falun Gong. But the language is, for the
most part, intentionally vague. It leaves wide discretion for any minor
official in China's dozens of regulatory agencies to demand that something
he finds offensive be taken offline.

Government officials from the State Council Information Office convene
weekly meetings with executives from the largest Internet service companies
‹ particularly major portals that run news stories and host blogs and
discussion boards ‹ to discuss what new topics are likely to emerge that
week that the party would prefer be censored. "It's known informally as the
'wind-blowing meeting' ‹ in other words, which way is the wind blowing," the
American businessman told me. The government officials provide warnings for
the days ahead, he explained. "They say: 'There's this party conference
going on this week. There are some foreign dignitaries here on this trip.' "

American Internet firms typically arrive in China expecting the government
to hand them an official blacklist of sites and words they must censor. They
quickly discover that no master list exists. Instead, the government simply
insists the firms interpret the vague regulations themselves. The companies
must do a sort of political mind reading and intuit in advance what the
government won't like. Last year, a list circulated online purporting to be
a blacklist of words the government gives to Chinese blogging firms,
including "democracy" and "human rights." In reality, the list had been
cobbled together by a young executive at a Chinese blog company. Every time
he received a request to take down a posting, he noted which phrase the
government had objected to, and after a while he developed his own list
simply to help his company avoid future hassles.

The penalty for noncompliance with censorship regulations can be serious. An
American public-relations consultant who recently worked for a major
domestic Chinese portal recalled an afternoon when Chinese police officers
burst into the company's offices, dragged the C.E.O. into a conference room
and berated him for failing to block illicit content. "He was pale with fear
afterward," she said. "You have to understand, these people are terrified,
just terrified. They're seriously worried about slipping up and going to
jail. They think about it every day they go into the office."

As a result, Internet executives in China most likely censor far more
material than they need to. The Chinese system relies on a classic
psychological truth: self-censorship is always far more comprehensive than
formal censorship. By having each private company assume responsibility for
its corner of the Internet, the government effectively outsources the
otherwise unmanageable task of monitoring the billions of e-mail messages,
news stories and chat postings that circulate every day in China. The
government's preferred method seems to be to leave the companies guessing,
then to call up occasionally with angry demands that a Web page be taken
down in 24 hours. "It's the panopticon," says James Mulvenon, a China
specialist who is the head of a Washington policy group called the Center
for Intelligence Research and Analysis. "There's a randomness to their
enforcement, and that creates a sense that they're looking at everything."

The government's filtering, while comprehensive, is not total. One day a
banned site might temporarily be visible, if the routers are overloaded ‹ or
if the government suddenly decides to tolerate it. The next day the site
might disappear again. Generally, everyday Internet users react with
caution. They rarely push the government's limits. There are lines that
cannot be crossed, and without actually talking about it much, everyone who
lives and breathes Chinese culture understands more or less where those
lines are. This is precisely what makes the environment so bewildering to
American Internet companies. What's allowed? What's not allowed?

In contrast to the confusion most Americans experience, Chinese businessmen
would often just laugh when I asked whether the government's censorship
regime was hard to navigate. "I'll tell you this, it's not more hard than
dealing with Sarbanes and Oxley," said Xin Ye, a founding executive of
Sohu.com, one of China's biggest Yahoo-like portals. (He was referring to
the American law that requires publicly held companies to report in depth on
their finances.) Another evening I had drinks in a Shanghai jazz bar with
Charles Chao, the president of Sina, the country's biggest news site. When I
asked him how often he needs to remove postings from the discussion boards
on Sina.com, he said, "It's not often." I asked if that meant once a week,
once a month or less often; he demurred. "I don't think I can talk about
it," he said. Yet he seemed less annoyed than amused by my line of
questioning. "I don't want to call it censorship," he said. "It's like in
every country: they have a bias. There are taboos you can't talk about in
the U.S., and everyone knows it."

Jack Ma put it more bluntly: "We don't want to annoy the government." Ma is
the hyperkinetic C.E.O. of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce firm. I met him in
November in the lobby of the China World Hotel in Beijing, just after Ma's
company had closed one of the biggest deals in Chinese Internet history.
Yahoo, whose share of the Chinese search-engine market had fallen (according
to one academic survey) to just 2.3 percent, had paid $1 billion to buy 40
percent of Alibaba and had given Ma complete control over all of Yahoo's
services in China, hoping he could do a better job with it. From his seat on
a plush sofa, Ma explained Alibaba's position on online speech. "Anything
that is illegal in China ‹ it's not going to be on our search engine.
Something that is really no good, like Falun Gong?" He shook his head in
disgust. "No! We are a business! Shareholders want to make money.
Shareholders want us to make the customer happy. Meanwhile, we do not have
any responsibilities saying we should do this or that political thing.
Forget about it!"

A Bit of a Revolution

Last fall, at a Starbucks in Beijing, I met with China's most famous
political blogger. Zhao Jing, a dapper, handsome 31-year-old in a gray
sweater, seemed positively exuberant as he explained how radically China had
changed since the Web arrived in the late 1990's. Before, he said, the party
controlled every single piece of media, but then Chinese began logging onto
discussion boards and setting up blogs, and it was as if a bell jar had
lifted. Even if you were still too cautious to talk about politics, the mere
idea that you could publicly state your opinion about anything ‹ the
weather, the local sports scene ‹ felt like a bit of a revolution.

Zhao (who now works in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times) pushed the
limits further than most. After college, he took a job as a hotel
receptionist in a small city. He figured that if he was lucky, he might one
day own his own business. When he went online in 1998, though, he realized
that what he really wanted to do was to speak out on political questions. He
began writing essays and posting them on discussion boards. Soon after he
started his online writing, a newspaper editor offered him a job as a
reporter.

"This is what the Internet does," Zhao said, flashing a smile. "One week
after I went on the Internet, I had a reputation all over the province. I
never thought I could be a writer. But I realized the problem wasn't me ‹ it
was my small town." Zhao lost his reporting job in March 2003 after his
paper published an essay by a retired official advocating political reform;
the government retaliated by shutting the paper down. Still eager to write,
in December 2004 Zhao started his blog, hosted on a blogging service with
servers in the U.K. His witty pro-free-speech essays, written under the name
Michael Anti, were soon drawing thousands of readers a day. Last August, the
government used the Great Firewall to block his site so that no one in China
could read it; defiant, he switched over to Microsoft's blogging tool,
called MSN Spaces. The government was almost certainly still monitoring his
work, but remarkably, he continued writing. Zhao knew he was safe, he told
me, because he knew where to draw the line.

"If you talk every day online and criticize the government, they don't
care," he said. "Because it's just talk. But if you organize ‹ even if it's
just three or four people ‹ that's what they crack down on. It's not speech;
it's organizing. People say I'm brave, but I'm not." The Internet brought
Zhao a certain amount of political influence, yet he seemed less excited
about the way his blog might transform the government and more excited about
the way it had transformed his sense of himself. Several young Chinese told
me the same thing. If the Internet is bringing a revolution to China, it is
experienced mostly as one of self-actualization: empowerment in a thousand
tiny, everyday ways.

One afternoon I visited with Jiang Jingyi, a 29-year-old Chinese woman who
makes her living selling clothes on eBay. When she opened the door to her
apartment in a trendy area of Shanghai, I felt as if I'd accidentally
stumbled into a chic SoHo boutique. Three long racks full of puffy winter
jackets and sweaters dominated the center of the living room, and neat rows
of designer running shoes and boots ringed the walls. As she served me tea
in a bedroom with four computers stacked on a desk, Jiang told me, through
an interpreter, that she used to work as a full-time graphic designer. But
she was a shopaholic, she said, and one day decided to take some of the
cheap clothes she'd found at a local factory and put them up for auction
online. They sold quickly, and she made a 30 percent profit. Over the next
three months, she sold more and more clothes, until one one day she realized
that her eBay profits were outstripping her weekly paycheck. She quit her
job and began auctioning full time, and now her monthly sales are in excess
of 100,000 yuan, or about $12,000.

"My parents can't understand it," she said with a giggle, as she clicked at
the computer to show me one of her latest auctions, a winter jacket selling
for 300 yuan. (Her description of the jacket translated as "Very trendy! You
will look cool!") At the moment, Jiang sells mostly to Chinese in other
major cities, since China's rudimentary banking system and the lack of a
reliable credit-card network mean there is no easy way to receive payments
from outside the country. But when Paypal ‹ eBay's online payment system ‹
finally links the global market with the Chinese market, she says she will
become a small international business, marketing cut-rate clothes directly
to hipsters in London or Los Angeles.

Compromises and Disclaimers

Google never did figure out exactly why it was knocked offline in 2002 by
the Chinese government. The blocking ended abruptly after two weeks, as
mysteriously as it had begun. But even after being unblocked, Google still
had troubles. The Great Firewall tends to slow down all traffic coming into
the country from the world outside. About 15 percent of the time, Google was
simply unavailable in China because of data jams. The firewall also began
punishing curious minds: whenever someone inside China searched for a banned
term, the firewall would often retaliate by sending back a command that
tricked the user's computer into believing Google itself had gone dead. For
several minutes, the user would be unable to load Google's search page ‹ a
digital slap on the wrist, as it were. For Google, these delays and
shutdowns were a real problem, because search engines like to boast about
delivering results in milliseconds. Baidu, Google's chief Chinese-language
rival, had no such problem, because its servers were located on Chinese soil
and thus inside the Great Firewall. Worse, Chinese universities had
virtually no access to foreign Web sites, which meant that impressionable
college students ‹ in other countries, Google's most ardent fans ‹ were
flocking instead to Baidu.

Brin and other Google executives realized that the firewall allowed them
only two choices, neither of which they relished. If Google remained aloof
and continued to run its Chinese site from foreign soil, it would face 
slowdowns from the firewall and the threat of more arbitrary blockades ‹ and 
eventually, the loss of market share to Baidu and other Chinese search 
engines. If it opened up a Chinese office and moved its servers onto Chinese 
territory, it would no longer have to fight to get past the firewall, and 
its service would speed up. But then Google would be subject to China's 
self-censorship laws.

What eventually drove Google into China was a carrot and a stick. Baidu was 
the stick: by 2005, it had thoroughly whomped its competition, amassing 
nearly half of the Chinese search market, while Google's market share 
remained stuck at 27 percent. The carrot was Google's halcyon concept of 
itself, the belief that merely by improving access to information in an 
authoritarian country, it would be doing good. Certainly, the company's 
officials figured, it could do better than the local Chinese firms, which 
acquiesce to the censorship regime with a shrug. Sure, Google would have to 
censor the most politically sensitive Web sites ‹ religious groups, 
democracy groups, memorials of the Tiananmen Square massacre ‹ along with 
pornography. But that was only a tiny percentage of what Chinese users 
search for on Google. Google could still improve Chinese citizens' ability 
to learn about AIDS, environmental problems, avian flu, world markets. 
Revenue, Brin told me, wasn't a big part of the equation. He said he thought 
it would be years before Google would make much if any profit in China. In 
fact, he argued, going into China "wasn't as much a business decision as a 
decision about getting people information. And we decided in the end that we 
should make this compromise."

He and his executives began discussing exactly which compromises they could 
tolerate. They decided that ‹ unlike Yahoo and Microsoft ‹ they would not 
offer e-mail or blogging services inside China, since that could put them in 
a position of being forced to censor blog postings or hand over dissidents' 
personal information to the secret police. They also decided they would not 
take down the existing, unfiltered Chinese-language version of the 
google.com engine. In essence, they would offer two search engines in 
Chinese. Chinese surfers could still access the old google.com; it would 
produce uncensored search results, though controversial links would still 
lead to dead ends, and the site would be slowed down and occasionally 
blocked entirely by the firewall. The new option would be google.cn, where 
the results would be censored by Google ‹ but would arrive quickly, reliably 
and unhindered by the firewall.

Brin and his team decided that if they were going to be forced to censor the 
results for a search for "Tiananmen Square," then they would put a 
disclaimer at the top of the search results on google.cn explaining that 
information had been removed in accordance with Chinese law. When Chinese 
users search for forbidden terms, Brin said, "they can notice what's 
missing, or at least notice the local control." It is precisely the solution 
you'd expect from a computer scientist: the absence of information is a type 
of information. (Google displays similar disclaimers in France and Germany, 
where they strip out links to pro-Nazi Web sites.)

Brin's team had one more challenge to confront: how to determine which sites 
to block? The Chinese government wouldn't give them a list. So Google's 
engineers hit on a high-tech solution. They set up a computer inside China 
and programmed it to try to access Web sites outside the country, one after 
another. If a site was blocked by the firewall, it meant the government 
regarded it as illicit ‹ so it became part of Google's blacklist.

The Google executives signed their license to become a Chinese Internet 
service in December 2005. They never formally sat down with government 
officials and received permission to put the disclaimer on censored search 
results. They simply decided to do it ‹ and waited to see how the government 
would react.

The China Storm

Google.cn formally opened on Jan. 27 this year, and human-rights activists 
immediately logged onto the new engine to see how it worked. The censorship 
was indeed comprehensive: the first page of results for "Falun Gong," they 
discovered, consisted solely of anti-Falun Gong sites. Google's 
image-searching engine ‹ which hunts for pictures ‹ produced equally skewed 
results. A query for "Tiananmen Square" omitted many iconic photos of the 
protest and the crackdown. Instead, it produced tourism pictures of the 
square lighted up at night and happy Chinese couples posing before it.

Google's timing could not have been worse. Google.cn was introduced into a 
political environment that was rapidly souring for American high-tech firms 
in China. Last September, Reporters Without Borders revealed that in 2004, 
Yahoo handed over an e-mail user's personal information to the Chinese 
government. The user, a business journalist named Shi Tao, had used his 
Chinese Yahoo account to leak details of a government document on press 
restrictions to a pro-democracy Web site run by Chinese exiles in New York. 
The government sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Then in December, 
Microsoft obeyed a government request to delete the writings of Zhao Jing ‹ 
the free-speech blogger I'd met with in the fall. What was most remarkable 
about this was that Microsoft's blogging service has no servers located in 
China; the company effectively allowed China's censors to reach across the 
ocean and erase data stored on American territory.

Against this backdrop, the Google executives probably expected to appear 
comparatively responsible and ethical. But instead, as the China storm 
swirled around Silicon Valley in February, Google bore the brunt of it. At 
the Congressional hearings where the three companies testified ‹ along with 
Cisco, makers of hardware used in the Great Firewall ‹ legislators assailed 
all the firms, but ripped into Google with particular fire. They asked how a 
company with the slogan "Don't Be Evil" could conspire with China's censors. 
"That makes you a functionary of the Chinese government," said Jim Leach, an 
Iowa Republican. "So if this Congress wanted to learn how to censor, we'd go 
to you."

Zhao Jing's Rankings

In February, I met with Zhao Jing again, two months after his pro-democracy 
blog was erased by Microsoft. We ordered drinks at a faux-Irish pub in 
downtown Beijing. Zhao was still as energetic as ever, though he also seemed 
a bit rueful over his exuberant comments in our last conversation. "I'm more 
cynical now," he said. His blog had been killed because of a single post. In 
December, a Chinese newspaper editor was fired, and Zhao called for a 
boycott of the paper. That apparently crossed the line. It was more than 
just talk; Zhao had now called for a political action. The government 
contacted Microsoft to demand the blog be shuttered, and the company 
complied ‹ earning it a chorus of outrage from free-speech advocates in the 
United States, who accused Microsoft of having acted without even receiving 
a formal legal request from the Chinese government.

Microsoft seemed chastened by the public uproar; at the Congressional 
hearings, the company's director of government relations expressed regret. 
To try to save face, Microsoft executives pointed out that they had saved a 
copy of the deleted blog postings and sent them to Zhao. What they did not 
mention, Zhao told me, is that they refused to e-mail Zhao the postings; 
they offered merely to burn them onto a CD and mail them to any address in 
the United States Zhao requested. Microsoft appeared to be so afraid of the 
Chinese government, Zhao noted with a bitter laugh, that the company would 
not even send the banned material into China by mail. (Microsoft declined to 
comment for this article.)

I expected Zhao 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. Microsoft came 
next; Zhao was obviously unhappy with its decision, but he said that it had 
produced such an easy-to-use blogging tool that, on balance, Microsoft was 
helping Chinese people to speak publicly. 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. (Yahoo did not 
respond to requests for comment.) Google, by contrast, had avoided 
introducing any service that could get someone jailed. It was censoring 
information, but Zhao considered that a sin of omission, rather than of 
commission.

The Distorted Universe

Zhao's moral calculus was striking, not least because it is so foreign to 
American ways of thinking. For most Americans, or certainly for most of 
those who think and write about China, there are no half-measures in 
democracy or free speech. A country either fully embraces these principles, 
or it disappears down the slippery slope of totalitarianism. But China's 
bloggers and Internet users have already lived at the bottom of the slippery 
slope. From their perspective, the Internet ‹ as filtered as it is ‹ has 
already changed Chinese society profoundly. For the younger generation, 
especially, it has turned public speech into a daily act. This, ultimately, 
is the perspective that Google has adopted, too. And it raises an 
interesting question: Can an imperfect Internet help change a society for 
the better?

One Internet executive I spoke to summed up the conundrum of China's 
Internet as the "distorted universe" problem. What happens to people's 
worldviews when they do a Google search for Falun Gong and almost 
exclusively find sites opposed to it, as would happen today on google.cn? 
Perhaps they would trust Google's authority and assume there is nothing to 
be found. This is the fear of Christopher Smith, the Republican 
representative who convened the recent Congressional hearings. "When Google 
sends you to a Chinese propaganda source on a sensitive subject, it's got 
the imprimatur of Google," he told me recently. "And that influences the 
next generation ‹ they think, Maybe we can live with this dictatorship. 
Without your Lech Walesas, you never get democracy." For Smith, Google's 
logic is the logic of appeasement. Like the companies that sought to 
"engage" with apartheid South Africa, Google's executives are too dedicated 
to profits ever to push for serious political change. (Earlier this month, 
Google's C.E.O., Eric Schmidt, visited Kai-Fu Lee in Beijing and told 
journalists that it would be "arrogant" of Google to try to change China's 
censorship laws.)

But perhaps the distorted universe is less of a problem in China, because ‹ 
as many Chinese citizens told me ‹ the Chinese people long ago learned to 
read past the distortions of Communist propaganda and media control. Guo 
Liang, the professor at the Chinese social sciences academy, told me about 
one revealing encounter. "These guys at Harvard did a study of the Chinese 
Internet," Guo said. "I talked to them and asked, 'What were your results?' 
They said, 'We think the Chinese government tries to control the Internet.' 
I just laughed. I said, 'We know that!' " Google's filtering of its results 
was not controversial for Guo because it was nothing new.

Andrew Lih, the Chinese-American professor at the University of Hong Kong, 
said that many in China take a long-term perspective. "Chinese people have a 
5,000-year view of history," he said. "You ban a Web site, and they're like: 
'Oh, give it time. It'll come back.' " Or consider the position of a group 
of Chinese Internet geeks trying to get access to Wikipedia, the massive 
free online encyclopedia where anyone can write an entry. Currently, all of 
wikipedia.com is blocked; the group is trying to convince Wikipedia's 
overseers to agree to the creation of a sanitized Chinese version with the 
potentially illegal entries removed. They argue that this would leave 99.9 
percent of Wikipedia intact, and if that material were freely available in 
China, they say, it would be a great boon for China, particularly for 
underfinanced and isolated schools. (So far, Wikipedia has said it will not 
allow the creation of a censored version of the encyclopedia.)

Given how flexible computer code is, there are plenty of ways to distort the 
universe ‹ to make its omissions more or less visible. At one point while 
developing google.cn, Google considered blocking all sites that refer to 
controversial topics. A search for Falun Gong in China would produce no 
sites in favor of it, but no sites opposing it either. What sort of effect 
would that have had? Remember too that when Google introduced its censored 
google.cn engine, it also left its original google.com Chinese-language 
engine online. Which means that any Chinese citizen can sit in a Net cafe, 
plug "Tiananmen Square" into each version of the search engine and then 
compare the different results ‹ a trick that makes the blacklist somewhat 
visible. Critics have suggested that Google should go even further and 
actually publish its blacklist online in the United States, making its act 
of censorship entirely transparent.

The Super Girl Theory

When I spoke to Kai-Fu Lee in Google's Beijing offices, there were moments 
that to me felt jarring. One minute he sounded like a freedom-loving 
Googler, arguing that the Internet inherently empowers its users. But the 
next minute he sounded more like Jack Ma of Alibaba ‹ insisting that the 
Chinese have no interest in rocking the boat. It is a circular logic I 
encountered again and again while talking to China's Internet executives: we 
don't feel bad about filtering political results because our users aren't 
looking for that stuff anyway.

They may be right about their users' behavior. But you could just as easily 
argue that their users are incurious because they're cowed. Who would openly 
search for illegal content in a public Internet cafe ‹ or even at home, 
since the government requires that every person with personal Internet 
access register his name and phone number with the government for tracking 
purposes? It is also possible that the government's crackdown on the 
Internet could become more intense if the country's huge population of poor 
farmers begins agitating online. The government is reasonably tolerant of 
well-educated professionals online. But the farmers, upset about corrupt 
local officials, are serious activists, and they pose a real threat to 
Beijing; they staged 70,000 demonstrations in 2004, many of which the 
government violently suppressed.

In the eyes of critics, Google is lying to itself about the desires of 
Chinese Internet users and collaborating with the Communist Party merely to 
secure a profitable market. To take Lee at his word is to take a leap of 
faith: that the Internet, simply through its own inherent properties, will 
slowly chip away at the government's ability to control speech, seeding a 
cultural change that strongly favors democracy. In this view, there will be 
no "great man" revolution in China, no Lech Walesa rallying his oppressed 
countrymen. Instead, the freedom fighters will be a half-billion mostly 
apolitical young Chinese, blogging and chatting about their dates, their 
favorite bands, video games ‹ an entire generation that is growing up with 
public speech as a regular habit.

At one point in our conversation, Lee talked about the "Super Girl" 
competition televised in China last year, the country's analogue to 
"American Idol." Much like the American version of the show, it featured 
young women belting out covers of mainstream Western pop songs amid a 
blizzard of corporate branding. (The full title of the show was "Mongolian 
Cow Sour Yogurt Super Girl Contest," in honor of its sponsor.) In each 
round, viewers could vote for their favorite competitor via text message 
from their mobile phones. As the season ran its course, it began to resemble 
a presidential election campaign, with delirious fans setting up Web sites 
urging voters to pick their favorite singer. In the final episode, eight 
million young Chinese used their mobile phones to vote; the winner was Li 
Yuchun, a 21-year-old who dressed like a schoolgirl and sang "Zombie," by 
the Irish band the Cranberries.

"If you think about a practice for democracy, this is it," Lee said. "People 
voted for Super Girls. They loved it ‹ they went out and campaigned." It may 
not be a revolution, in other words, but it might be a start.

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer. He frequently reports about 
technology for the magazine.