Ten weeks after raising the alarm over the hacking of Chinese users' e-mail accounts, Google yesterday ended censorship of its local Chinese search engine as threatened. Traffic will now be redirected to its uncensored Hong Kong arm. This is a lose-lose scenario.
If Google had hoped to rally rivals to its cause, it failed. Within hours of Google's January statement, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft characterised it as the “Google problem”; commercial partners were then quick to do deals with others. If Google was planning to embarrass China by whipping up a global debate on internet freedom, it failed. The big Sino-US flashpoints remain the same: Taiwan, Tibet and the trade surplus. Events elsewhere, meanwhile – such as the conviction last month of Google executives in a Milan court, for privacy violations – made Beijing seem lenient.
Enlightened souls in China should rue the closure of Google.cn. At the opening event of this year's National People's Congress, a spokesman made an apparently sincere analogy between Baidu, China's default search champion, and Wang Meng, the gold medal-winning speed skater, breaking records thanks to a vigorous rival breathing down her neck. Still, in internet cafés outside big cities, closure of Google's Chinese site would barely register.