A new approach to China: an update | Hacker News Reader

A new approach to China: an update

googleblog.blogspot.com

286 pointsGVRV122 comments

Pretty frightening that they need to reiterate this (they mentioned this in the original announcement): Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them. Despite all the uncertainty and difficulties they have faced since we made our announcement in January, they have continued to focus on serving our Chinese users and customers. We are immensely proud of them.

If the Chinese government is going to hold some google employees responsible (for whatever), do you think reiterating that statement is going do anything?

Don't be partisan.

> Don't be partisan.

In what sense?

China is not stupid. They already look bad, and retaliating by ruining a few Google employee's lives is not going to make them look better. When China starts alienating the western companies, they are simply going to leave, leaving China with nothing. That would not be good for them, so I think they will try and avoid it.

The Chinese Government simply does not care what others think of it - especially the west.

All you need to do is look at the case of Stern Hu and Rio Tinto to find out how much the Chinese Government cares about its reputation amongst western corporations.

I don't think you're right. They seem to have a policy of strong censorship, but not at any cost. I think this applies to related are as well. Controlling the costs of their censorship is important to them. So, for example I wouldn't be surprised if one of the things they asked themselves was 'If we block Google completely, are there any services that we can't live without?'

Interestingly, Stern Hu pleaded guilty to bribery recently:

http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Stern-Hu-...

Are you surprised?

How long do you think it took for them to beat it out of him?

We'll have to wait for the sentence to be handed down, if any jail time / execution is handed, that would really be interesting!

It's true. It's time to impose sanctions and deal with the consequences.

IMO, the most valuable thing to come out of all of this is the China apps status dashboard:

http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en

tells us what China is currently allowing, blocking, or partially blocking.

Seriously. It would be nice to see a widget like this that anyone could throw up on their site or blog. Problem would be getting the update -- you'd have to have a server in China pinging all the participating sites, I suppose.

This could be a very nice way for the web to passively protest China's censorship: put a strip at the top of your blog that displays whether or not your blog is readable in China at the moment. Even if the Chinese couldn't see it, plenty of people outside of China would, raising awareness of the problem and putting pressure on China.

Could someone please explain to me the frequency of the sentence, "Seriously."? An in joke? I don't get it...

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Seriously&...

I never stopped to think this was a regional colloquialism, but I suppose it is..

I used it above to mean "I agree"

When you see that, mentally swap it with 'Fo shizzle', then you should be ok.

(Strong agreement, like, 'Indeed!', 'Right on!', 'Quite!', 'You said it!', 'Yeah no kidding!', 'For sure!', (or more recently, 'this!' :) ))

There may be some connection to HomeStar Runner, which has been a part of "nerd culture" (or some subset) for at least a decade.

I think it's just another idiom. It has been around, in this form, for a long time.

Would be nice to see one dedicated to tech sites in general, e.g., http://www.python.org/download/ which has been blocked by the Firewall within China for the last 6 months.

http://www.python.org/download/ is not blocked from Shanghai

It's been blocked from my apartment in Wuhan with the instant "Connection Reset" message for the last 6 months, whereas the rest of the Python.org site has been available. Perhaps the national Firewall can target geographic areas inside China, and someone in the Firewall Bureau wanted to restrict Python's available somewhat, but hide the fact by limiting it download page outside the main cities. Though I can't imagine why! Or perhaps it's being blocked at a more local (ISP) level, but I think that's unlikely. I'll check it next time I'm at Starbucks with my laptop.

Would be nice to have a similar dashboard for each country in the world.

Re: the wrench by Google docs. Google spreadsheets are blocked here, but not the rest of the service as far as I can tell. Why? One can only ponder what goes on in the censors' heads.

Probably someone created a spreadsheet with measurements and pie-charts showing the actual costs and benefits of the current government :)

Haha, all the images on Wikipedia are also filtered and my assumption for the reason was pretty similar to what you just suggested.

Perhaps the spreadsheet component of Google Docs is better than Baidu's.

It would be nice if they listed the status of Appengine too.

Awesome, except the munged copyright symbol. Pretty unusual for Google to have encoding issues in copy (and not to be using the entity).

It looks good to me.

I see the good ole' question-mark diamond. I see the same thing when I view-source.

Changing my text encoding to latin-1 fixed the display.

I'm on Chrome, amusingly enough, on OS X 10.6.

Weird, works for me with both chromium-daily & Chromium Dev channel, Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64.

It was probably copy pasted by the legal department from a word document. Just because they're google doesn't mean they can change how lawyers work. ;-)

What do "Web" and "Sites" mean? I assume one tells us whether China is blocking Google search results.

I presume "Web" is the main web search, and "Sites" is sites.google.com

Web = Search Results; Sites = A Google Apps product and personal websites hosted by Google

Thanks.

And the most valuable thing to be squashed by it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1211947

Just made it my new home page!

It's a few years old but Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/ may be interesting

The last paragraph says a lot between the lines. "Please don't put our employees in jail."

They really should offer to relocate them to the US

Unless Google has closer ties to the government than I was aware of, they don't necessarily have that power.

It's relatively easy for a company to relocate employees, as long as it has a reasonable need for specifically those people. If it wants skilled employees with a native-level knowledge of the language and culture, it wouldn't be hard to relocate them. Having said that, it's entirely possible that those employees don't want to be relocated. If my company's relations soured in my country, I'd rather quit and find a new job then leave for the company.

Re relocating to the US, specifically: I've been through the H-1B visa process - I have the visa, but I never actually jumped. Quite apart from times when it's oversubscribed and becomes a lottery, there are any number of small hurdles you could fail on.

But if it's relocation to anywhere not-China, then yes, that ought not to be too difficult.

There are visas other than H-1B.

And, Google just needs to get the people out of Mainland China. If their safety is in danger for actions that they had no control over, I'm sure some country will give them asylum.

Or maybe China realizes that it lost, and will model the rest of the country after Hong Kong. (Remember, Hong Kong is technically mainland China.)

That would have interesting implications. If Google relocated a large number of employees someplace with a pleasant immigration process, I mean.

I've been through the same process, and all those hurdles are extremely easy to avoid and/or overcome if a company has a decent set of lawyers who deal with this thing. That kind of resource is easily within Google's reach, especially judging by the number of other companies who have legal departments dedicated to the process.

Of course the other possibility is they are with Google on this and are willing to face it out if needed.

Sure just make sure they don't have the words, gambling, DRM, downloading, torrent, drugs, porn etc in the code and they won't be detained in the US.

I still remember globalization training back at Microsoft. The short version was, "Take this stuff seriously. A few years ago, somebody left the string Taiwan in a product and China detained & questioned a bunch of unrelated employees who just happened to be in-country." Of course, the world was a different place ~2002.

http://bit.ly/b5ocjf

That link resolves to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/aug/19/microsoft.b...

I'm somewhat disturbed by the proliferation of short links outside their original motivating uses, like print and social messaging. As it is, bit.ly does various sorts of tracking, but in general, short links add a variable to the chain and and increase the susceptibility of breakage over time; or worse, changing in a bait and switch move.

Despite my prior work affiliation, no evil was intended --- I stand corrected :-)

Google doesn't have to make this statement. I believe no one will be put in jail because of Google's leaving. And it's not a BIG issue as you think.

The Chinese people cares house, education and health care more. Most of them don't use Google at all.

Most of them don't use Google at all.

Google's chinese marketshare disagrees with you: http://gs.statcounter.com/press

I mean the people. You might know 3/4 of Chinese people are farmers. Most of them are poorly educated. They usually work hard for a living and don't use google's services at all. You won't hear the voice from them. But they are the majority of China.

The farmers aren't the guys putting people in jail for disobeying censorship rules.

My first thought was that they were trying to protect their employees from the Chinese people, a subset of whom seem quite keen on starting nationalistic internet lynch mobs. Obviously the government is pretty dangerous as well, but I thought it was interesting that they weren't the first thing that sprang to mind.

It is possible the Chinese government will only partially block google.com.hk. This it how it has often worked with Wikipedia. You can browse the site, but as soon as any forbidden phrase is passed over the TCP connection it is cut. Then all access to the site from your IP is blocked for a while. This makes the service very intermittent, and makes it difficult for users to distinguish between censorship and overloaded servers. There is also the question of what will happen to the google.cn domain, as all websites in China are required to have an ICP license from a government agency.

"It's entirely legal ... We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision"

Not much of a leg to stand on. I wouldn't want to be a Google employee in China right now.

that's true, but in my opinion it's better than constantly caving in to censorship

My main fear is that China will use this opportunity, as the Chinese proverb goes: "kill the rooster to warn the monkey" - i.e., arrest/charge a few higher-level Google China people (Chinese citizens, they won't touch Americans).

Public opinion in China re: Google is very, very much sided with the Chinese government - people in general believe Google to be bullies pushing their American-style beliefs down their throats, and the people I've spoken to almost unanimously think that it's about damned time Google left China.

If a few key people are arrested/charged for conspiring to violate the law, it would be a major PR victory for the PRC domestically ("government stands up to Western bullying tactics, no safe refuge for collaborators" and the such), not to mention potentially warding off other companies trying to make the same stand.

Interesting times.

Where do you get this information about public opinion? My experience is that the white collar workers who use Google side with Google... and nobody else knows what Google is.

I went to college with a large number of Chinese international students, my ex-gf was Chinese (and thus my circles are full of them), plus I am Chinese (well, Taiwanese, but shhh)

Most internet users in China are well aware of who Google is - though Baidu still has a strong grip on the search industry than ol' Goog. The overwhelming opinion I got from the Chinese I know when this issue first surfaced in January was "good riddance, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out".

Remember, the younger generation in China right now almost religiously, dogmatically believe in the party line. It's frightful.

I live and run a business here in Beijing. The majority of my customers are young adult mainlanders (white collar, 18-35 years old) and my employees are mainlanders as well. Also my girlfriend of 6+ years.

I don't find any of what you say to be true. Especially the part about religious and dogmatic belief in the party line - most of the Chinese I deal with find the gov't obnoxious and untrustworthy. Of course, that could vary with socioeconomic class, but even my relatively young workers, who are of a different social group than my customers, seem to feel that way as well (poison milk, bribery scandals, etc). In my experience, the people who are supportive of the party are usually older (40-50+).

Odd that our experiences are so different, and I'm not sure where we'll be able to find objective data to resolve the differences in information.

I think the different experiences comes down to socioeconomic status - my impression comes from Chinese expats, in particular international students. This demographic is best summed up in a single word: "over-privileged"

These are the direct beneficiaries of the current regime, and I even personally knew a couple whose parents were unabashedly in the bribery business. They all tow the party line something fierce... scary, especially since they're "destined" to be the Chinese leaders of tomorrow :S

I'm glad to hear that "normal" Chinese aren't nearly as bad as the ones I've met. This gives me hope.

About the poison milk/bribery stuff though: even the people I know don't agree with these things, and are more than willing to admit the government's failure in preventing these things. However, if you dare bring up Western-style agricultural/industrial policies as a means to mitigate this sort of thing, you are in for some major hostility. This may be unique to the demographic I talk to, but basically only they are allowed to criticize the Chinese government - if you represent some kind of western ideology you're frowned upon.

But I don't think it's an issue of socioeconomic status. My point in mentioning my business was that I need to understand my demographic very thoroughly (I work 7 days a week catering to their needs). Many of my customers have studied abroad and most of them work in the Central Business District here for large multinational corporations. My demographic also includes students at elite Chinese universities like Beida and Qinghua. And I have yet to encounter what you are describing among them. Maybe the closest is one guy who wanted to climb the CCP ranks to change all the problems he saw with the current system.

> They all toe the party line something fierce... scary, especially since they're "destined" to be the Chinese leaders of tomorrow :S

You are surprised by this? I'd be surprised if it wasn't like this. It's the party that will be getting them into leadership roles; of course they will support it with everything they have.

Maybe the way you criticize triggered their defensive reaction?

I was an international student myself and have no problem criticizing the government with my friends (Chinese or otherwise). But if someone comes in with harsh tone, I will in all arms defending my country. And I find this common among citizens of most countries.

I'm a college student in Shanghai, and my classmates and friends' attitude towards the party is almost opposite to what you said, I'm afraid.

As to what other people say in Xiaonei, which is a site I'll visit everyday, many people there are complaining about the network censorship in China. On the other side, it's also a site censored by the government, which means users' comments, blogs and updates will soon be deleted if they contain illegal keywords. It doesn't allow free speech at all. So what you see may not represent the majority.

On the other hand, many of us has access to twitter, using SSH tunnel/API/proxy or something else to jump over the wall. And what you see on twitter may differ greatly on what you see in Xiaonei. Sorry for my poor English :P

Your English is just fine, essentially indistinguishable from native speakers :)

I've seen the same thing. My cousin's friend (Chinese) who is in Canada for school acknowledges the Chinese gov't has problems, but is even more anti-west. And from what I've seen on the internet (www.chinasmack.com) the "netizens" don't see the chinese government favorably either.

This is misleading.

Among the posh, well-educated elites who aspire for jobs at US MNCs this may be true.

The rest of the masses are very much one-sided in support of the CCP. At the very least, even if they are sympathetic to Google's cause, at the end of the day the masses will always believe that China (and the CCP by extension) > Google (or any other western MNC).

That is the reality for the vast majority of Chinese - both online or otherwise.

The China vs Google issue is not really about internet freedoms in the eyes of the polity as it is in the eyes of westerners. Rather, its about a western MNC trying to "bully" the Chinese into adopting their (western) values. This line of thinking; westerners bullying China has been pounded by the CCP for the past 60 years so its very easy to troll that line to great success.

>westerners bullying China has been pounded by the CCP for the past 60 years so its very easy to troll that line to great success.

Actually it was 'trolled' long before the CCP came in to power by revolutionaries, and most likely citizens.

The history of China has been miserable for the past two centuries, culminated defeat in opium wars and wars with Japan has resulted in compensation with land and money. Several unsuccessful civil uprisings has also cost many lives and ruined the economy - many people in that time lived in poverty!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China#Dynastic_rule

The degree to which people inside China complain about the government seems to more closely relate to how much they trust you than their station in life.

As far as being "anti-west" goes, can you elaborate on what specific western values/beliefs/policies the younger chinese are against?

I'm just wondering where you get this public opinion, which is quite different from what I heard. And I'm in Shanghai, China.

See my other post below, but to add:

A lot of what I'm basing this observation on is poking around in Xiaonei (Chinese Facebook knockoff), the chatter in there is alarmingly (and almost militaristic) anti-west. This may be because the part of the social graph I was looking at was mostly upper-class Chinese (being that my main "in" with the Chinese is international students/expats, who are much better off that most).

It is likely (in fact, most probably) that the working class Chinese would have entirely different views.

The wealthier off probably are more invested in their national identity.

Very interesting that you mention militaristic. Been observing similar attitudes and frankly it scares me.

Just nationalism.... the tea baggers are just as vitriolic...

Not sure why you got downvoted - I would say the comparison is apt. I've seen some disturbing things on Xiaonei, things like a map of the USA with a gigantic PRC flag sticking out of it, and other bits of aggressive nationalistic posturing.

Not your parent poster, but his comments were very similar to what I heard in Chongqing, which is more traditional and less cosmopolitan than Shanghai/Beijing.

My friend in Beijing has a completely different attitude.

Tiny sample size, just my personal experience.

Actually, it is not legal in terms of China law. The law requires any website, in mainland China or not, need to implement a process called beian (a licensing procedure and that is the reason why you can see ICP XXXXXX on any Chinese target website). It is a strong legal justification that gives local police the authority to block any foreign website at will. For a commercial website, the beian process will cost about $1000 dollars (you have to hire agency which has close connection to the Chinese government to do this) and any foreign website in principal cannot implement this process (it requires or in tradition only limited to the company that significant share (more than 50%) was hold by Chinese capital entities or individuals). Google.cn, prior to the announcement held a ICP licence from its local partner. Kaifu Lee did a lot work in the back scene that made the whole ICP transaction procedure OK to China government.

For your curiosity, the local Chinese companies that were listed on NASDAQ all go with a mode in which the company that registered in China will hold the license and sign a contract with the offshore company that actually gets listed to guarantee the profit will go to the offshore company in order to mitigate the restrictions.

Beian http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/ only applies to servers inside of China. China law can't extend outside its borders. It is free to apply for a beian.

CNNIC passed a rule at the end of last year that essentially means only companies registered in China can hold .cn domains http://www.cnnic.net.cn/html/Dir/2009/12/12/5750.htm

You can host whatever TLD site you want in China (.com etc.) You just need to register it and get an ICP (beian). It's a form of publishing and all publishing is controlled. So why would you host in side of China? Speed. Traversing the GFW slows everything down.

Based on the Internet Information Services Management Approach (http://www.cnnic.net.cn/html/Dir/2000/09/25/0652.htm), anyone who provide Internet information services in mainland China needs to beian (be careful about the word they use here. As long as you provide service to mainland China user, you have to). For non-commercial website, it is free. For commercial website, it is free for you to apply, but in practice, you have to hire an agency to get the licence.

For those who are not Chinese native speakers, I use Google translate to give you the keywords:

"Second, in the PRC engaged in Internet information service activities, must comply with these measures.

"The term Internet information services, refer to Internet users through the Internet to provide information services activities."

Hey Googlers on HN, I live in China and access Gmail from my local connection. Where is my Gmail data located?

Disclaimer: this is not an official answer from Google, and while I have worked there I do not at present.

There are data centers around the world, however Google only stores sensitive data in locations where it can guarantee security and privacy[1]. Quoting from an official blog post from 2006,

"Protection of user privacy -- We will not maintain on Chinese soil any services, like email, that involve personal or confidential data. This means that we will not, for example, host Gmail or Blogger, our email and blogging tools, in China."

What this means is that your data could be stored in a number of countries, which will include a copy in the U.S. and not include a copy in China.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony-internet-in...

It hopefully won't matter. I'm on the mainland, and my gmail, igoogle (now re-directed to google.hk), and google translate are up.

News and search have been surgically removed.

edit: search is up? down? wtf? Whatever, I can use yahoo.

In some ways I can't believe they actually did it.

That's actually brilliant. They're both complying with the letter of the law and forcing the Chinese government to actively shut them down. I hope all their non-Chinese employees have exited the country...

Some things I used to be able to search for on google.cn, but are now filtered by my ISP (via connection reset):

http://www.google.com.hk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8... (6/4)

http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=zh-CN&source=hp&q... (Tian'anmen 1989)

I'm sure a native Chinese can give a better list. Superficially at least, it looks like ISP level censorship has gotten worse.

Isn't it a little scary to search this stuff in China?

A little I guess, but I'm an American, so I feel somewhat safer. Also, everything I know about my adopted homeland tells me that you only really get in trouble if you're agitating vocally for serious political change (something I don't really care about).

Probably not. China is not North Korea, I would guess nobody really cares what you are searching for.

(Conceptually it’s probably not that much different from children watching M-rated movies. The government in the US doesn’t care, even if they know children are watching that stuff. Police won’t come busting through your door. They are only interested in making it impossible for children to buy that stuff. The problem in China is of course that much more stuff is blocked and not just for children.)

Definitely not. It's just a connection reset. People won't be put in jail because they have searched these.

What about Google Cache?

And all this time analysts were saying Google would stand down from its principles on this matter. I quite like this page: http://www.google.com/prc/report.html#hl=en as well as the general tenor of these actions.

For all the rights and wrongs of such a decision; kudos to them for going through with their threat.

I thought their threat was to leave. They haven't exactly left. It's more like they've thrown more doodoo into fan.

I have some colleagues and good friends in Beijing, most of them coming from various provinces to Beijing for their jobs - they are not high up in the ladder socio-economically. The impression I get is that they love China (to the extent of choosing not to go abroad to live and work), but resent the party's overbearing ways. They are not going to go out and protest, but that doesn't mean they like their government much either. They tell me banned publications are fairly widely available, if you know how to find them, and many of them are fairly knowledgeable about stuff the party doesn't want them to know about.

Funnily enough I have colleagues in the USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc who feel exactly the same way.

Could this be the first big salvo in a protectionist effort against Chinese imports? It certainly provides some political cover for the Treasury to declare CN a currency manipulator in the next couple of weeks.

Are there any projections out there of how tariffs would affect technology the markets?

Sadly, you are being downvoted, though I think questioning things is "the hacker way". It is one thing to just yell "freedom" and quite another to actually analyze things.

Personally, the speed with which the US government issued a statement last time this story surfaced really surprised me, and makes one wonder how close the relationship between big corporations and the government really is.

They don't need a close official relationship- Google is a flagship American corporation, its decisions matter to the USFG.

The two things are completely unrelated. How does Google ceasing to self-censor results in mainland China have anything to do with the Treasury's response to Chinese currency policy? It would be a mistake to conflate the two.

I have a similar feeling to the grand parent, frankly, there has been a lot of anti-china stuff appearing from the US lately. I will admit that I support most of the stuff but I still find it odd that multiple companies, the gov and others are all mounting an attack on China right now. It seems a little too coincidental.

/conspiracy

Not entirely unrelated, part of Googles reason for leaving is that China has been distorting the market in favor of their Chinese competition - protectionism.

So getting more publicity for these acts provides political cover should the US carry out similar acts - they can claim it's quid pro quo.

I realize they are unrelated, but it takes only one fanned spark to ignite nationalism. It's one thing for China to down a spy plane, but what Google is doing is taking the high ground. It just feels different, like the environment is being prepped for more severe action.

[edit] And I don't even mean a coordinated salvo, but rather the type of event that historians will one day look back on, as a turning point.

http://www.google.cn now redirects to http://www.google.com.hk/, and there is a line of message saying 欢迎您来到谷歌搜索在中国的新家, which means "Welcome to the new home for Google Search in China".

Whatever this leads Google needs to stay in China even if they ban it in Hong Kong.

Supposedly one of the reasons Google's stand has been so "principled" is because of Sergey Brin's early years in the Soviet Union.

That begs the question though, if the Soviet Union had Google and the internet would it have collapsed sooner or would it have taken longer?

I think it is funny that I am visiting China right now and I cannot see the article because googleblog.blogspot.com is blocked. I'll have to bookmark it to be read when I get back home.

I found a copy of the text on: http://en.mye.ir/a-new-approach-to-china-an-update/ available from within China.

I haven't seen anyone mention, how long it'll take for China to ban Google from Hong Kong. I understand it runs the place already (indirectly maybe), sure they'll have to change laws, but I haven't gotten the impression that that's an obstacle.

sure they'll have to change laws, but I haven't gotten the impression that that's an obstacle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Basic_Law_Article_23

Last time China tried to change a law here, 500,000 people marched through the central business district, the secretaries for security and finance resigned, and the law never got passed. So no.

I hope they gave Google.cn employees a chance to resign. Ideally, a month or two ago.

That would put the ones who didn't resign in even hotter water; it would be seen as, 'you had a chance to get out and you chose to stay? That's even worse.'

You may be right -- I have heard through some informal contacts that the decision to pull out of China was taken at the highest levels, and in secret.

Apparently this is a deliberate strategy when dealing with totalitarian governments -- even if they have people on the ground, they have to keep them in the dark about big decisions.

Most employees can resign at any time they wish. Not sure why Google would need to explicitly "give them a chance". Am I missing something obvious?

Maybe he meant "resign with some sort of stock-option buyout"?

Because when you are about to publicly challenge a totalitarian government, it might be a good idea to tell the staff in advance.

For Google, the big question about establishing operations in China was always the hostage scenario. If they can jail your people, can you really be brave about censorship? To their credit Google isn't backing down, but the risks are real and they ought to reiterate this to their staff beforehand.

Respect to Google! But I'm afraid the servers in Hong Kong will be blocked very soon.

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