Google Collaborationists
I am surprised that no enterprising young reporter has decided to “connect the dots” regarding Google and the “evil Chinese censorship”. The facts are easy enough to verify. Google has one of the highest per-capita concentration of children of Chinese central government officials of any U.S. organization their size. Now, I would not claim that this is a deliberate ploy by Google to get an “in” with the nepotism-prone Chinese market. Nor would I claim that the influence of employees friendly to central government has determined company policy. I personally don’t find the statistic that interesting. But I would expect that a reporter sworn to uphold all that is virtuous to at least explore this.
On the other hand, I want to clear up an unfair criticism of Google. Someone pointed out that you get different results for:
- http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen [google.com]
- http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen [google.cn]
My first instict, is that the U.S. results are unfair. Tiananmen is like Times Square; millions of people associate the place with happy memories, not tanks. It is only in the west that we associate the name with tanks. The fact that U.S. results show tanks is simply a case of international Google-bombing.
In fact, it turns out that this is exactly the case, and you do not even need to introduce censorship to explain the google.cn results. Try searching google.com [US] for the actual Chinese word: 天安门. You will see much the same results as with google.cn [China]. Now, what happens when you type a word like “Tiananmen” into google.cn, is the Pinyin is *automatically* converted to Chinese, and returns results fo 天安门. This is smart, because most people in China type Chinese using Pinyin input, and this makes it easy for Chinese customers to search for information written in Chinese.
Now, you could argue that the lack of pages written in Chinese which show tanks, is a result of censorship. But that is 99% B.S. I leave that to the reader to think about and confirm.