The China syndrome

 

A few years ago, Google launched its search service in mainland China. China has more than a billion citizens, a rapidly growing middle class, and one of the fastest Internet adoption rates in the world. By 2025, China will be the world’s largest economy. For a global Internet services company like Google to ignore these facts is suicide.

For four years, Google allowed its search results to be censored by the Chinese government, a government with a long record of human-rights abuses. Google grumbled about the censorship, but they put up with it until they were hacked by someone in China in early 2010. The level of sophistication behind the attack was unheard of in the corporate sphere; the hackers used tactics and tech typically only employed by government or military organizations. They were looking for search engine source code and access to the e-mail accounts of human rights activists.

Google left mainland China shortly thereafter, but it wasn’t an aversion to evil that led them to drop China—it was a threat to their bottom line. In this case, the best interests of the Chinese people happen to align with Google’s profitability. The question here is, can Google maintain and correlate its profit with the good of the people forever?