Google, Inc. and China Essay

A big part of the â€Å"big if† is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its one-party rule over that country. Nevertheless, the CCP intends to incorporate the Internet and digital networks into its strategic economic development plans and help it to become a significant element in the network society. Then-president Jiang Zemin is quoted in Foster and Goodman (2000: xii; cited in Hassan, 2004 p. 60) as saying that ‘Internet technology is going to change the international situation, military combat, production, culture and economic aspects of our daily lives significantly. He omitted to mention ‘politics’ in his list, of course, and the CCP struggles, vainly, to control what growing numbers of Mainland Chinese read, see and hear on the Internet. In China, the popular search engine Google is classified as a media company and access is restricted. Until recently, Web- pages served by Google to users in China had to pass through filters set up by the Chinese government that eliminate information the State does not want people to see. In 2006, Google announced that it would set up a local site in China, to better serve the China market. The site would feature only â€Å"sanitized† search results that met the approval of the Chinese government. So next time you are in Beijing, try searching for Falun Gong, the social group that so upsets the ruling party, and see what, if anything you get (Meza, 2007 p. 116). Good has significantly yet unknowingly reached the borders of Chinese efforts to maintain the presence of communism and the innate government rule; however, the unbiased and direct information imposed in the search engines of Google threatens all these political efforts (Hassan, 2004 p. 61). Background Chinese users love the Google Internet search engine because it reads Chinese characters. In mid-2002 the Chinese government blocked access to Google and tried to limit access to the CNN and BIIC web site’s (Sloan 2002; cited in Hassan, 2004 p. 60). However, for Chinese users with a minimum of Internet knowledge and a willingness to defy their government, it was simply a matter of a few mouse-clicks to detour around those sites blocked and limited by the authorities and search or browse through a Google, CNN and 61 mirror-site instead. Censoring the Internet’s content, especially its political content, seems set to he a constant (and ultimately unsuccessful) rearguard action for the CCP (Hassan, 2004 p. 60-61). Google technologies could result in states being able to exert much greater influence through the Internet. Technology will advance to make censorship easier, even automated. Google has long promoted the ideal of access to information. Its mission, according to a Goggle attorney, is â€Å"to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. † Google concluded that the company could not provide a high level of service in China without a local presence. The Chinese government may well have found a way to control this vast amount of information using a variety of filtering software. One method uses filtering technology that in effect disables features of the search engine Google by tapping into snapshots of web pages stored on Google servers—which are based outside China’ that formerly provided a common way for Chinese to view sites that were otherwise blocked (Landow, 2006 p. 324).