Last Friday, I had the chance to hear CMU SCS Ph.D. alum, and president of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee speak on the building Google China and what it means to do business in China versus the United States. It reminded me of the fact that what we accept for “The Internet” – Amazon, eBay, Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc – isn’t universal. In fact, what we refer to as the “The Internet” barely exists in other markets. Most American web companies that have invested in China have failed spectacularly – never gaining market share, or buying the dominant Chinese firm and running them into the ground. Dr. Lee made it clear that Google was planning for the long run and had no intention of being driven into the ground – largely because they have the resources and are willing to burn lots of cash in the process of understand the market and developing tools to serve the market.
Throughout his presentation, he briefly mentioned a few of the political challenges around building companies in China. For example, when he was listing how Chinese view western web products, for Wikipedia he listed “no access to wikipedia” and for MySpace he listed “periodic access to MySpace”. These garnered a chuckle out of the people in the audience, but they highlight very real issues with the Chinese governments attempts at censoring the net. Google, for their part, has acquiesced to the Chinese government demands, and censored their search results.
An easy, and obvious example of this is doing a Google search for Tiananmen Square. On the English language web, the top hits on this topic are related to the 1989 massacre there. On the Chinese web it’s all the articles you’d see about a square area in any large city. Of course, most Chinese aren’t going to be searching in English, rather they’d search for 天安门广场. Comparing the images on the US Google images search and the Chinese Google images search shows quite the difference. For the US the first four images are typical info images, but then the subject quickly changes to the protest with the photo of the tank man who defiantly stood in front of a column of Chinese tanks only to later be whisked away to who knows where.
According to Dr. Lee, the real reason for this is that Google tries to provide culturally relevant searches. This makes some sense – in the UK someone searching for Biscuits is looking for what we call Cookies here in the US. They should not be subject to dozens of recipes for biscuits and gravy. At the same time, most people above the age of 25 know the power of the protests in Tiananmen Square – I was nine at the time and vividly remember the news and pictures out of China. It’s an aspect of Chinese history that has been washed away by the Chinese government – only they can’t erase the memory from the rest of the world. It also sets a very dangerous precedent for companies operating in repressive regimes. What if the protests from Burma, which were captured on Flickr and numerous other sites, happened in China? Would Google be obligated to censor such information at government decree? The answer is probably yes, and I’m sure they would.
When pressured about the issue through a question which was much more weakly worded than what I would have used (I tried to get called on, but was in a bad position), Dr. Lee stated that Google’s position was that they believed the Chinese people were better with their products than without. Translation: “We’d really like to make money there, even if it does help out a repressive regime”. Will all this make me stop using Google products? No. Does it change my views on Google? Yes. I’m very disappointed that a company that is so loved in the US has taken such a weak stance abroad. They claim they have patience, if that’s true, they should have the patience to not contribute to a corrupt totalitarian regimes effort to censor information for the purpose of maintaining a political elite with complete control.
