Google's apparent upcoming pullout from China is surely an anomaly, a huge communications company acting on principle rather than profit motive. In the long run, the equation is likely to work out with China as the loser as its growing economy, its road to modernization and its rise in living standards will certainly suffer with its access to information invaluable to its development blocked by a frightened government. Google has complied with all laws and regulations placed on it by the Chinese government, calculating that its very presence as a “good citizen” in China would allow it to slowly chip away at what has frequently been termed the “Great Firewall of China.” It is the old and often valid argument that engagement is far more profitable, on all levels, than attempts at isolation. It is the ethos that essentially garnered a Nobel Peace Prize for Barack Obama as he engaged in international diplomacy as opposed to his predecessors unilateral attempts at bullying the world. Google agreed to Chinese censorship, which went so far as to assure that certain search terms simply do not work in the system. “Tianamin Square massacre”, for example, produces nothing when typed into the search engine from China. Despite the controversy generated by Google's compliance with Chinese demands, it was ultimately the hacking of Google computers that prompted the company to announce its intention to withdraw from China. Assaults launched from China itself infiltrated Google computers and broke into the e-mail accounts of Google users, most pertinently the accounts of Chinese dissidents whose activities were being monitored by the government. Google has done much to prompt the ire of those who defend intellectual property rights. Specifically, its intention to digitalize and make digitally available virtually every work of literature in the world has provoked numerous complaints and debates. But in this case, it is using its size and power to declare its own operating principles. Clearly, Google does not really need China to ensure its bottom line. China, however, seems not to want to continue its progression into the modern world. Even the coverage of Google's impending pullout has been censored from the news in China. __
