A Chinese man looks at a note and flowers left as support outside the Google China headquarters in Beijing. Photograph: Ng Han Guan/AP
In response to increasingly strict demands over censorship, mounting government intervention, and a disastrous cyber-attack in December, Google has decided to pull its search engine functionality out of China. As of March 22nd, 2010, users in China proper are being rerouted away from the Google.cn website to offshore servers based in Hong Kong.
The mainstream media has, thus far, failed to pick up the implications of the decision to route mainland users to Hong Kong. This proves a metaphorical smack in the face to Chinese leadership as animosity between the former British colony and the Communist party runs deep. Hong Kong has long asserted a nominal independence from China since its reintegration in 1997.
Officially a special administrative region, Hong Kong continues to exist as a unique, semi-sovereign global actor. Its political, economic, and judicial systems oppose the “socialist” system of mainland China. When the constitution of Hong Kong came into effect in 1997, Chapter 1, Article 5 of this document titled “Hong Kong Basic Law” was written to state the following:
The socialist system and policies shall not be practiced in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years.
Whether Google was aware of the latent animosity between Hong Kong, whose population consists of 95% ethnic Chinese, and the Communist party remains unclear. Hong Kong features a regulatory economic system similar to the system employed in the U.S., functions in accordance with English common law, and looks to be on the precipice of universal suffrage, which should come into effect in the next decade or so.
All of this underscores the fact that Google has become a de facto player in global politics, whether it likes it or not. To the rest of the globe, Google reflects the position of the U.S. at large. The idea that a company can act in true independence from its host nation is still a foreign one to most states in the international system. The U.S. remains the outlier in global politics when looking at state-market relations, choosing to take a positivist, laisezze-faire approach to government regulation.
Calls from China demanding that the U.S. government seek action against Google were met with resistance from the White House. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton stated last week that Google’s actions were the exclusive concernof the Google and the Chinese state.
That hasn’t kept the Chinese from stirring the firmament of already strained U.S.-China relations. “The search engine leader’s exit from the Chinese mainland is a deliberate plot,” Ding Yifan, a researcher at the Development Research Center under China’s State Council, wrote in the China Daily. “Google’s case is in essence part of the U.S. Internet intrusive strategy worldwide under the excuse that it advocates a free Internet.”
So where does this leave Google in Asia? The company’s exit from China portends good things for Japan and Korea where Google has hereto struggled to acquire market share from domestic competitors. China’s Asian neighbors are more amendable to the presence of multinational behemoths akin to Google, and will likely welcome the foreign investment with open arms.
