SAN FRANCISCO — With negotiations over censorship at an impasse, Google Inc. shut down its search engine operation in China on Monday and redirected users to uncensored results – a move certain to jeopardize Google’s future in the world’s most populous country.
In taking the extraordinary action, Google said it was making good on a promise it made two months ago, when it said it would not self-censor the site, as demanded by Chinese officials. At the time, Google also complained that it had been a victim of a sophisticated cyber attack originating from China.

“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in a blog post. “We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.”

Additional Photos

A Chinese worker cleans the Google logo at the Google China headquarters in Beijing, China, on Monday. The Associated Press

Beijing’s response was swift.

“Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” an unnamed government leader told China’s official news service, Xinhua.
Google said it would try to remain a presence in China by directing search engine requests by Chinese users to its uncensored Hong Kong service. Although it remains to be seen whether that strategy will work, experts say one thing is certain: It will further strain the company’s relations with China.

“Google has burned its bridges. It has made the Chinese government lose face,” said Christopher Tang, a business professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

As a result of Google’s decision Monday to stop self-censoring in China and reroute to Hong Kong, users were able to get access to many more results when searching on sensitive topics such as the Tiananmen Square crackdown, Taiwanese independence and the Dalai Lama.

ut the links provided on the Hong Kong service were  blocked by China’s censorship machinery  and couldn’t be opened.

If the standoff persists, Google will lose ad revenue and the chance to further develop its other businesses, including mobile applications, in a nation with nearly 400 million Web users.

“This is a huge hit businesswise, no question,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a visiting fellow at Princeton and expert on Chinese censorship.

Foreign firms rarely publicly challenge China’s policies or threaten to scale back or leave a market deemed so crucial, making Google’s pullout all the more unsettling for foreign businesses there, especially U.S. ones.
 

Related Stories