Written by Mao Zedong said that to have power you need two things: the gun and the pen …
The Communist Party has the gun, but the Internet is now the pen. If they lose control of it, Something will happen to challenge their authority.
· 2000: A Chinese-language interface is developed for the google.com website.
· 2006: Launch of China-based google.cn search page with censored results.
· Mar-Jun 2009: China blocks access to Google’s YouTube site; access to other Google online services is denied to users.
· Jan 2010: Google announces it is no longer willing to censor searches in China and may pull out of the country.
· Feb 2010: Hacking attacks on Google are traced to mainland China.
· March 2010: Google says it will re-route searches to its Hong Kong-based site
Google.cn now redirects to Google.com.hk
The final move by Google to redirect its services to the Google Hong Kong came after long hours of negotiations failed with Chinese authorities, whom we like to think as terminator style bureaucrats dressed just like Chairman Mao and talking like the old man in Chinese martial arts movies and who thought that the infamous ‘self-regulation’ was non-negotiable. Now Google has decided to take Google users to Hong Kong, a place where people and bureaucrats were schooled by The Queen herself, Where the Chinese rules of censorship do not apply.
The move is also in response to the cyber attacks on Google in December which has been reported to originate from mainland china and targeted Google’s corporate infrastructure as well as the Gmail accounts of several Chinese human rights activists.
Google’s Chinese censorship is a widely talked subject up to a level of congressional hearings in the U.S. with Google executives where congressmen made an analogy of Nazi collaborators with Google’s Chinese policy. But Google, as we may see was just a tool used by the Chinese government to build what is now known as the great firewall of china. At first, Google was a regular search provider in china, even though not providing links to pirated music and movies like Baidu was immensely popular among the white collar Chinese cosmopolitan population.
But then came Sept. 3 2002 when Google vanished in thin air in china, when millions of Chinese Google users got the same old error message when trying to access google.com in china, some suspected Baidu of instigating it but nonetheless the age of the Chinese great firewall had started. Along with the pre-existing award by the Chinese Government for Self-discipline to its local search providers and websites.
Actually, no single list of blacklisted words, keywords and catchphrases existed. The government simple told the companies, including Google not to circulate content on certain subjects including material that “damages the honor or interests of the state” or “disturbs the public order or destroys public stability” or even “infringes upon national
Customs and habits.” It leads to an autocratic de-democratization of knowledge where any minor official in any Chinese regulatory body to demand anything that HE, personally thinks offensive to be taken offline.
But at last, on March 22, 2010 Google has started to re-route every search query from mainland china to google.com.hk and present the results in simplified Chinese. This move may worsen Google’s relations with the Chinese government but will surely result in the upgrade in Google’s image on Chinese people and international human rights groups and democratic watchdogs. Though Chinese government has again started to censor the information routed from Hong Kong through internal routers, Google has cleaned itself of the accusation of repression of free speech in the name of profit.