Ask HN: Whatever happened to Google pulling out of China? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Whatever happened to Google pulling out of China?

24 pointsgarply9 comments

Google.cn is still up and running and it's definitely still censored.

Anyone have updates on what's going on with the story? Is Google still planning on carrying through with the following threat?

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China." (1/12/2010)

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I do not think they can run an uncensored google.cn as per the law stands. All the posting say is that they will spend few weeks trying to find a way to do that. These things take time. Let's hope Google is trying.

Censored how? I was wondering the same the other day, and looked for Tienanmen square. I did get a few results from the protests.

A query for "Tiananmen 1989" (in Chinese):

h^ttp://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q=天安门+1989&btnG=Google+搜索&aq=f&oq=

"据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。"

"In accordance with the laws and regulations of your land, certain search results are not displayed."

Some of the pages are completely blank.

E.g., h^ttp://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&newwindow=1&q=天安门+1989&start=20&sa=N

(Please remove the ^s and paste in links yourself... I didn't really want to send a bunch of referrals from HN to those queries).

That's always been true if you spell it like a westerner.

If you think about it at all, it's a very organic result. Chinese people don't link to stuff about what happened on the square 20 years ago nearly as much as they link to stuff going on there normally, because they live there and it's an enormous public plaza.

Americans, on the other hand, don't mention it for any reason other than in the context of China's embarrassment.

Aren't the censored results always annotated as such anyway?

"If you think about it at all, it's a very organic result. Chinese people don't link to stuff about what happened on the square 20 years ago nearly as much as they link to stuff going on there normally, because they live there and it's an enormous public plaza."

Good point! No one ever "links" to things that happened in the past! That would just be stupid!

"Americans, on the other hand, don't mention it for any reason other than in the context of China's embarrassment."

Exactly! Americans are a bunch of pricks, yo!

"Aren't the censored results always annotated as such anyway?"

Exactly! Oh, wait, no they're not. Nice try though!

I think your response is needlessly sarcastic.

The poster makes three claims:

1. The search was spelled wrong. True, although the Western media often spells Tiananmen, Tian'anmen is more correct in untoned official pinyin.

2. People in China would not link to "Tiananmen" in reference to the twenty-year-old historical incident as often as to the place, which is the site of many contemporary events. In 1989, the same year, San Francisco experienced a very strong earthquake that killed and injured thousands. Yet a search for San Francisco on Google returns only one reference to this in the two two pages. Is that censorship? Or is it that San Francisco has been in the news since then and is more commonly linked to for the thousand of events that have happened since?

3. The connection between the protest and the "Tian'anmen" name is stronger in English than in Chinese. True. For example, if you go to the English Wikipedia page for Tiananmen incident, and click on the Chinese version of the page, you'll notice it's called 六四事件 "The event of June Fourth." The name "Tian'anmen" is not associated with the violence and the protest in Chinese, whereas it is the only reason the word is ever printed in media outside the country.

Your second point is the wrong comparison. Searching for "San Francisco" is not equivalent to searching for "Tiananmen 1989." If you search for "San Francisco 1989" the Loma Prieta earthquake is indeed the dominant result.

Since point two has already been debunked enough, (though there's plenty of room for more), I would not that Tian'anmen is "correct in untone official pinyin" that of course is used by almost no one, inside or outside of china.

As for your third point, since you can read chines you know that there is extensive information on the page talking about other commonly used names, many of which include the Tiananmen phrase. In fact, the first section of the chinese article goes into a fair bit of detail about that. Furthermore, seeing as wikipedia is hardly democratic, or used under "free conditions in China", I see no reason to use it as the baseline for determining what is common, or the common usage of certain terms, especially a term that connotes an event that the majority (or a substantial percentage) of chinese people under say, age 30, have never heard of.

As for the "needlessly sarcastic", when did the internet become a place where sarcasm eternally brought about the wrath of other commenters? Is the problem the "needless"　sarcasm, as opposed to the sarcasm in general? Doesn't personality mean anything? And if it's the "needless" part, let's be honest, is hackernews really "needed" at all?

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