Get real. Do you really believe the government will go after Google's Chinese employee?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_People%27s_...
More specifically:
"On 17 Oct 2009, Reuters reported that Guo Quan a professor in Nanjing Teachers University was sentenced to 10 years in jail for "inciting Subversion" of Government. There are more than 40 people in jail for criticizing the government."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_People%27s_...
Threatening to provide or actually providing uncensored search results to the public could certainly be construed as inciting subversion.
Do you know the full story of the 40 people in jail for criticizing the government? Do you know the population in China? Do you know how many people are jailed in US because of Patriot Act, with no reason and no trial?
People like to bring this up, and I have a few things to say about it.
1) Just because the US does something, doesn't mean it's OK. We nuked fucking Japan. Doesn't make nuclear war OK.
2) The people held by the US are not citizens, they are soldiers picked up in war zones and held outside the US. Completely unacceptable? Yes. Violation of international law? Hopefully. But this is not what's going on in China. Normal citizens, with full rights under the law, are being openly convicted and suffering harsh penalties for speaking out against the government.
If the US government did what the Chinese government did, in this narrow category, the government officials would be the ones in prison. The US is far from perfect, but it is pretty good.
"Normal citizens, with full rights under the law, are being openly convicted and suffering harsh penalties for speaking out against the government."
I would argue, in most cases, they are not normal citizens, even though in western media, they are portrait as freedom fighter. I can even tell you how to find information to prove this point: check out the China Study program in John Hopkins University (the top one in US), and they will tell you the conclusion in political science field is the freedom fighters from the Tiananman Square in 1989 are extremists. I don't think the reporters will go out and interview those political scientists. There are other good China Study program you can get academic opinions from, including Univ. of Iowa (another top 1), UW is good as well.
I am not arguing with you that there is no human right issue in China. There are, but the problem is presented out of the context and in many cases with false information. I am only suggesting that people do more firsthand investigation and talk to Chinese for some full stories, but looks like I am getting enough down-votes now.
If you have credible evidence that Guo was a violent, extremist terrorist funded by the West, I'd love to see it.
From http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-approach-to-china... :
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
I won't even try to convince you with my opinion, just encourage you to talk to Chinese living in western countries to get a full story. Google has good information about "emotion" and it is a media company. A popular media theory is "if you control their emotion, you control their opinion."
You will have much better view of the whole story if you can read Chinese media, just for the full story. You might refuse to do so because they are controlled by the government. I ask you to talk to Chinese, you refuse as well because you think there is no need. How "sound" do you think your opinion will be?
I think Chinese tend to avoid talking shit about their country in front of foreigners to "save face". It seems to be part of the culture.
Why do you think that China would never do anything to a Google employee if Google the company did something that China didn't like.
It has already happened in countries that are supposedly less strict than China, See the case of Italy issuing an arrest warrant for Google employee's due to a youtube video.
Yes, I can believe something like that could happen.
It could be a way to get back at google for defying them, for example.