Google is now being punished for the world's condemnation of China's internet censorship. Today's attacks by official Chinese Communist Party newspapers carry the demand from the butchers in Beijing:
"Do more evil" or lose all your investment.
* Censor much more.
* Remove the statement of missing results for banned words.
* Invest even more money (so they can hold a greater amount of Google's money hostage to assure compliant behaviour).
* Block any Chinese access to Google.com (watch to see if that link on google.cn vanishes soon).
* Most of all the regime wants all the discussion about Chinese internet censorship stopped--obviously Google can't control that, but they are being punished anyway because it was the contradiction of their "do no evil" motto and their censoring in China that helped bring Chinese censorship to light so vividly.
Google is likely now deeply regretting and rethinking their China deal. The lure of easy profits brought them into China, but their mistake was trusting the Chinese government to act like a government in a free country.
The painful lesson is that all dictatorships (and criminals) routinely lie and take advantage of those gullible enough to trust them. As an example, the arms control agreements the US signed with the Soviets were violated on an incredibly massive scale. Once the Soviet empire collapsed, some Eastern European countries asked the US what to do with the treaty-violating missiles they had. Past is prologue.
Google now is now between a rock and a hard place:
Either abandon ship or "do more evil".
I have some sympathy for their current situation, but a bit of research could have told them that doing business with dictatorships is always dangerous. If you sleep with a tiger, don't be too surprised if one day you become it's breakfast.
Those who wish to turn a blind eye to the realities of the Nazi-like horrors of the Chinese Communist regime can fool themselves if they want (it's easy to do from the comfort of home or even in a luxury hotel in Beijing), but as Google is finding out, the butchers in Beijing mean deadly business in crushing any discussion of freedom or human rights; so as to try to perpetuate their endangered and corrupt rule.
They may allow economic development--the taxes pay the bills of running a dictatorship, but they are NOT reforming on political freedom issues, instead becoming even more repressive as the Chinese increasingly demand real freedom. Their "Laogai" concentration camps are full of political dissidents. If you need an organ transplant, go to China and they'll shoot one just for you. Hideous. The Chinese products we buy help fund a military buildup designed to crush Taiwan and to become the successor to Imperial WW-II era Japan: seizing dictatorial control in Asia and the Pacific. A great many apparently independent companies in China are owned by the government--but not just any government agency, they are owned by the People's Liberation Army, which gets billions of it's war-machine funding from profitable sales of consumer products in the west. How did North Korea get their atom bomb? The plans and equipment likely came from China, which stole them from the US. Chinese nuclear cooperation with Iran serves their interests too--a nuclear attack by Iran on the West would let China take the Pacific without a shot--and without getting the blame or retaliation. China never was what President Bush calls a "strategic partner"--in China's own military journals they advocate nuclear attacks on the US. THEY view the west as an enemy to defeat. We are blind to pretend otherwise.
30 minutes of research would have told Google enough to think twice about going to China. Instead they got suckered.
The pressure on Google from the Chinese regime won't stop until they get exactly what they wanted all along. They won't settle for the "censorship with a human face" promise with which they lured Google into their trap.
My bet is within a week or two we'll see Google pull out of China rather than "do more evil".
