Chilling effects of Google?s China saga - upiasia.com
Chinas business environment is not as friendly to foreign companies as it appears to be; even if they are renowned and successful outside China. Look at how many Internet companies have run on the rocks in China, including EBay, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Google is just one more on the list!
Baidu generates far less outcomes than Google and it even manipulates the placement of search outcomes based on how much a related advertiser pays, which has been condemned as unethical.
ust as Chinese news portals have their origins in Yahoo!, and Youku.com, Chinas leading Internet video website, mimics YouTube, Baidu is a copycat with its homepage a shanzhai, or imitation, version of Google.
Two months ago, in the column mentioned above, I quoted a sentence on China and Google by
Thomas Friedman, the columnist of The New York Times. Here, I would like to cite the entire paragraph in which the comment appeared his comments three years ago painted a scenario of who would win if China were to lose Google:
No question, China has been able to command an impressive effort to end illiteracy, greatly increasing its number of high school grads and new universities. But I still believe
it is very hard to produce a culture of innovation in a country that censors Google which for me is a proxy for curtailing peoples ability to imagine and try anything they want. You can command K-12 education. But you cant command innovation. Rigor and competence, without freedom, will take China only so far. China will have to find a way to loosen up, without losing control, if it wants to be a truly innovative nation.