For any business to survive in China, they have to do the biddings of the government. If not you will be forced or stifled to either completely pulled out of the country or sell their stake to an indigenous Chinese competitor whom the government is vigorously promoting.
A good example of this is Uber exiting China by selling its stake to Chinese ride-sharing company Didi-Chuxing. Uber, in turn, got around 20% share of the Chinese company, which will run Uber’s Chinese operation as a separate brand.
Unsurprisingly and despite the vicious stifling, the big tech companies keep returning to China. Why? This is because the Asian country is a huge market.
While Uber has ‘chickened out’ of China, Google is attempting to enter the Chinese market by singing the tunes of the government, which is perhaps the only way these companies can successfully get into China.
The strategy for Google is that it is reportedly planning to relaunch its search engine in China, complete with censored results to meet the demands of the Chinese government. The company originally shut down its Chinese search engine in 2010, citing government attempts to “limit free speech on the web.”
But according to a report from The Intercept, the US tech giant now wants to return to the world’s biggest single market for internet users.
According to internal documents provided to The Intercept by a whistleblower, Google has been developing a censored version of its search engine under the codename “Dragonfly” since the beginning of 2017. The search engine is being built as an Android mobile app and will reportedly “blacklist sensitive queries” and filter out all websites blocked by China’s web censors (including Wikipedia and BBC News). The censorship will extend to Google’s image search, spell check, and suggested search features.
The whistleblower who spoke to The Intercept said they did so because they were “against large companies and governments collaborating in the oppression of their people.” They also suggested that “what is done in China will become a template for many other nations.”
According to The Intercept, Google faces a number of substantial barriers before it can launch its new search app in China, including approval from officials in Beijing and “confidence within Google” that the app will be better than its main rival in China, Baidu.
Google previously offered a censored version of its search engine in China between 2006 and 2010, before pulling out of the country after facing criticism in the US. (Politicians said the company was acting as a “functionary of the Chinese government.”).
