Google Just Can't Quit China

Can “don’t be evil” survive China’s great firewall?

- Mark Bergen

If you’re planning on moving to China anytime soon, here’s a piece of advice: Get yourself a WeChat account. Open up the “super app,” as it’s known in China, and you can do almost anything: Pay your cab fare, order from a five-star restaurant, buy fruit from a street vendor, or even give alms to a panhandler—they often wear QR codes slung around their necks. It’s possible to spend long stretches in China without so much as touching a banknote.

This makes the world’s second-largest economy an internet- enabled paradise, albeit with an important caveat. Much of the internet isn’t available. Facebook, Twitter, and parts of Wikipedia are all blocked by the “Great Firewall,” the program of government censorship that keeps anything even vaguely subversive offline. You can read the BBC, but only if you speak English. China blocks the broadcaster’s Mandarin news service, along with Bloomberg.com, the New York Times, and pretty much any news that contradicts the Communist Party line about Tibet, Falun Gong, Taiwan, or the country’s slowing economy.

And there’s no Google. The website that for many people is indistinguishable from the internet hasn’t operated in mainland China since 2010, when founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided that removing controversial links from search results, as the government in Beijing requires, was unacceptable. “We don’t want to run a service that’s politically censored,” Brin said at TED that year. His employees applauded the move as a perfect expression of the company’s “Don’t be evil” ethos.