Executive Chairman of Google Eric Schmidt speaks at the Chinese University in Hong Kong on November 4, 2013. PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images
The Chinese government’s attitude has grown increasingly disapproving of Google’s presence on the country’s web over the last couple of years, especially in the last six months of 2014. Beijing has always had a problem with how intrinsic Google is on Chinese internet portals, and how necessary it has become for Chinese businesses. But since May of this year, the government has been taking more steps towards monitoring and blocking some access to specific Google’s services — an effort that bodes ill for business and tech growth alike.
While it has been no secret that China’s government bears some animosity towards Google and its proliferation of its sites, apps, and services, officials have recently launched more intense blockages of the Mountain View-based company. The New York Times reports that the blockages are specifically affecting business productivity. It quotes Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group, a Shanghai consulting firm: “Companies overlooked Internet problems when the economy was booming. But now a lot of companies are asking whether they really need to be in China.”
VISUAL CONTEXT: CATEGORIES OF CENSORED WEB CONTENT
Source: OpenNet Initiative
Citizens have not entirely taken this problem lying down. In an unprecedented move, Wang Long, a legal practitioner, sued China Unicom — his telecom provider — for failing to provide access to Google earlier this year.
Needless to say, these continued clampdowns are bad news for the China’s growth in the technology sector — a market the government is purportedly trying to encourage to seek competition with American business. Some argue that the country would be well-advised to let Google alone in order to encourage competition in the realm of search engines, cloud storage, and communication. But there seems to be little hope of stemming the blockages and slowdowns of its services. And Google is not the only target: The government has banned YouTube (owned by Google) and Facebook, and has begun using Twitter to censor content on the web. The rocky relationship between the government and social media — even regarding China’s native social networks — persists.
This is not to say that China isn’t experiencing steady interest from native startups in expanding in the technology sector, and success from bigger companies. Indeed, the country’s largest e-commerce company Alibaba launched an IPO last week that puts its value alongside those U.S. tech giants such as Facebook and Google. But if internet blockages and censorship of content persist as they have this year, the landscape of China’s internet — particularly involving business investment — is uncertain.
