Google Waving the Piece of Pie from China

On March 23th 2010, Google announced officially to close the google.cn in China and reorient the site in google.com.hk. Having been threatening to leave for two months, it was still not able to ‘detour around’ the strict censorship[1].

Google – Failed to compete with Local Players

Entered China in 2000, Google’s market share has shrunk from 1/4 to 14%  in ten years. Its local competitor Baidu, now the No.1 search engine site in China, accounts for about 68% clicks [2]. This result is not surprising as Yahoo has sold its share to Alibaba, MSN Messenger comes No.2 after Tencent QQ, whereas eBay finds no way to catch up with the most popular local trading platform – Taobao [1].

Obviously, Chinese goverment prefer national online firms which are under control [2] , while we couldn’t deny the fact that these local websites have solid performance. In contrast, the foreign companies haven’t got a clue on how to blend their product features into the local culture.

Nevertheless, there might be some political reason rather than the technical problems for Google’s final decision, as any enterprise would not easily give up the piece of big pie from the world’s largest online market.

(Resource: news.yahoo.com)

Chinese Situation – When will it Blow Up?

There’s an interesting metaphor from Hanhan, a young and elite writer from Shanghai. He said in the blog that offering Chinese citizens 100% free rights to speak is like adding more free vegetables to their baskets. They are definitely happy to receive it, while it makes no huge difference if you refuse to offer them as they already have too much pressure from work and life. Google has overestimated Chinese people’s reaction toward the issue in his threatening policy. If one wants to get resources from google he’s still got the method to ’cross over’ the Great Firewall.

Chinese censorship has already blocked global popular websites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter. It’s a shame that the government  is so scared of open public voice that it hires around 30 thousand staff to censor the internet. It is not prepared to confront any riots or rebellion.  I’m not a person with great political sense, but at the end of the day, a nation can’t be strong enough or well developed with its citizens receiving such asymmetric information.

Anyway, this is also a culture thing.  We can see British youngsters drinking their head off every nights for fun, for socialising or whatever excitement they get. I reckon such excessive excitement is largely due to the British law that forbidding kids under 18 to touch alcohol. In consequence, there are more teenagers stealing beer or  causing accident because of over drunk. The law is absolute necessary for the current British drinking culture, while it’s just a similar phenomenon that the harder you want to control, the crazier their attitude will be.

Fortunately, with more people studying and working abroad, the Chinese young generation is becoming more subjective towards the government’s words and policies. It takes a long time for this nation to open up as the restrict of conventional culture and the uncertainty of potential risks that might benefit minor rioters. However, as the famous Chinese saying goes, to conquer the flood you’d better open branches to let the water flow away if the dam doesn’t work.

References:

[1] China thwarts Google’s detour around censorship. Yahoo News

[2] Google Shuts China Site in Dispute Over . New York Times

Advertisement