during the President Hu Jintao years, even as China’s economy has raced ahead and a wealthy, sophisticated middle-class has arisen from nowhere, the repression of free speech and other basic freedoms guaranteed by China’s constitution has only increased, consistent with the nearly total lack of political reform during this period.

Asia Times
By John Parker

Although the dispute between the Chinese government and Google continues to evolve, there were signs at the beginning of April that a ceasefire may be taking hold, one that could allow both sides to plausibly claim victory. At the end of March, Google failed to renew its Internet Content Provider (ICP) license in China; since an ICP license is required for all China-registered commercial websites, this effectively sounded the death knell for Google’s simplified-Chinese search engine, google.cn.

All requests for the google.cn website are now redirected to Google’s Hong Kong site, www.google.com.hk. The pullout has obviously damaged Google’s business prospects in China, but it is not clear how much, since the company continues to conduct research and development work in China, as well as serving mainland Chinese customers for the company’s numerous other

products, including mail, translation, online ads, and so on. At the same time, the Mountain View, California-based company could reasonably claim that it had stuck to its well-known “don’t be evil” slogan: the company’s leaders clearly chose principle over profit by pulling out of China, the world’s fastest-growing Internet market.

As for the Chinese government, it sought to force compliance with its policy of censoring the Internet; in this it has succeeded, at least in the short term, since Google’s unwillingness to cooperate with the censorship policy led to the company shutting the door, in spite of its arguably great importance to Chinese Internet users.
As of April 12, the Hong Kong site was freely available.   more …