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Comment by jklm | Hacker News Reader

Google operates in China: https://careers.google.com/locations/shanghai/

Google isn't available in China. If you attempt to go to the Chinese .cn domain site, it redirects you to the .hk one instead.

The decision to leave mainland China occurred in 2010 after Google announced that, in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on them and other US tech companies, they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely if necessary. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China

Yes, this is pretty well known.

What's not well known is that Google still operates in China and makes billions [0] off advertising there. So Google has hardly 'pulled out of China' despite not running a search engine. At this point, they wouldn't succeed even if they tried - so it's more an excuse than anything else that they don't _want_ to operate Google the search engine there.

[0] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/googles-ad-sales-fro...

I can't tell if you're trying to purposefully obfuscate / be antagonistic right now, but I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

The Information article you cite, explicitly says itself that this increased revenue comes from "a wave of Chinese tech companies buying ads outside China to promote products like the TikTok video app and the Alipay mobile wallet".

Are you trying to imply that the actions of any Chinese company should be assumed to be an extension of the central government's? I mean, I suppose you could argue that. But otherwise, all this represents is a company with an international presence buying ads to advertise their product/service.

I didn't imply anything about the central government. I was responding to your assertion that "you would do what Google has done and completely remove yourself from China." I don't think Google is the saint you make them out to be if they're making billions of dollars from Chinese sources.

Google has always been a B2B company - their revenue comes from businesses. Even if Google the search engine were running in China, where would the revenue be coming from? Still Chinese businesses. I don't think it's relevant whether the spending is domestic or international in nature.

Okay, but what you're still doing here is conflating Chinese businesses and the Chinese government together into a singular source.

Again, it's totally fine if you want to argue that as I agree there's some merit to the idea, but from your first sentence, it seems like that isn't what you're trying to say.

They are all the same thing, remove my business presence in any fashion because Chinese government has human right issue ABC == not doing business with Chinese people. This approach has also great potential to grow into racism or nationalisms war ground (“sorry you are Chinese not doing business with you because you government did ABC). It’s not a conflation but the fact is they are intertwined under the unified culture of China. You might think China should be pretty divided as US does, no it’s not, its majority mainland population are quite unionized at scale. Its overseas presence were more critical before but Honestly what Western media is doing is pushing them back into supporting the government

Google still operates in China. They help Chinese military develop AI to round up Uighers for future organ harvesting. https://youtu.be/wqWVH38jtQo5

Having an office in China (they actually have several) is different from having a market in China. They pulled out the market.

They're a B2B company, and they're still selling to their primary market - Chinese businesses - via advertising.

It’ll be interesting to start a discussion if that should also be cutoff(much like a Huawei ban, but this time entire nation)

...and then started working on rejoining it, before terminating the project in July this year.

Fun anecdote: In 2010, it was Sergey Brin (now a president of Alphabet) who drove Google's withdrawal from China. In 2018, in what I'm sure is just a coincidence, the public found out that Google's project shares the name with Brin's yacht: Dragonfly.

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