The Machine That Won’t Quit: Why Even Google Isn’t Enough to End Chinese Censorship

A few weeks ago, Google stunned the world by announcing that it would consider withdrawing from China completely as an Internet server. For a number of reasons, Google’s statement was a shocker. For years, the company has steadily and firmly maintained that it would not back out of the Chinese market, one of  its largest and fastest growing areas, despite China’s heavy censorship of what people can and can’t find on the Internet. However, recent cyber-attacks against Google have finally awakened the corporation into realizing that its relationship with China is not tenable in the long run.

However, the brief period of praise human rights groups heaped upon Google for finally being the sole major company to stand up to Chinese censorship, the outpouring of “mourning” Chinese Internet users showed to Google (most notably through bouquets placed in front of Google’s Chinese headquarters), and excited speculation that the Chinese government might finally cave in to pressure and loosen its grasp on the Web, have all faded, and for good reason. From the start, it was clear that even Google, the Internet giant that took the world by storm , is not powerful enough to deliver an ultimatum to China to change their policies.

Google is certainly the most popular Internet search engine in the world today, but that thardly matters to most Chinese. Even if the search giant were to actually withdraw and close up shop completely in China, other search engines, like Baidu and Bing would just step in to fill the void, and Chinese Internet surfers wouldn’t even realize the difference. The government oligarchs in charge would care even less; in the long run, Google would suffer by missing out on business in potentially its biggest market. Google already has already lost some ground to rival Chinese search engine Baidu, as indicated in a recent study by Analysis International that showed Google with only 29.1% of the Chinese Internet market, and Baidu with 61.6%. Regardless of how many bouquets have shown up on Google China’s doorstep, Google cannot change the Chinese government alone.

The problem with combating censorship in China is that the negative effects aren’t visible to most Chinese. Democracy advocates still haven’t come up with good reasons to prove to the Chinese that censorship is depriving them of vital information, like the true history of the Tiananmen Square Massacre that the communist leadership continues to keep quiet about, conflicts in Tibet and Xinjiang, and much more.

One of the major obstacles to persuading people to realize how wrong censorship is remains the booming Chinese economy, which briefly suffered in 2008 but is now back on its feet and rising again. China’s leaders have learned from past experiences in the Soviet Union and other communist countries that the economy is key; with a healthy economy, people have jobs, food on the table, money to spend, and thus can be kept satisfied and unmotivated to rebel. Secondly, the government also vigorously works to use the media to manipulate Chinese viewers into trusting the current leadership and remaining hostile to foreign nations, namely the United States. Censored and blocked media convince Chinese that it is safer and better to keep living under communism.

Perhaps the most perplexing and worst problem that keeps censorship the norm is that most Chinese are fully aware of it, but simply don’t mind. Polls indicate that 80% of Chinese Internet users know that the government places strict limits on what Web content they can and can’t see, but do not mind. Having grown up around these rules all their lives, and not knowing anything different, many Chinese simply cope with the problem, in a perfect example of ignorance as bliss in action.

If China is to ever become more democratic and stop its consistent censorship of any information deemed subversive, there will have to be enormous change within the entire CCP, something that appears unlikely in the near future. The Chinese people also have to learn that living with ignorance of the things the government doesn’t want them to know is inherently harmful, and that they need unfiltered access to knowledge in order to be truly free and lead better lives. Knowledge entails unhappiness, problems, and the like, but with knowledge also comes responsibility, efforts to solve problems, and achievement, which would make China a more respected international player and participant in the world. Unfortunately, Google isn’t enough at the moment to create such reform; it’s going to take something larger than the world’s largest search engine to change the world’s largest country.