China Will Block Google’s Hong Kong Site

China has not come as far as it has in its battle with Google (GOOG) over censorship not to deliver the final blow. Google says it will close its site on the mainland, Google.cn, and redirect traffic to its operation in Hong Kong. The US search company will not censor the results it displays from its Hong Kong-based site, Google.com.hk.

Google believes, at least as far as it is willing to say in public, that it has been clever enough to get around the censorship authorities in the People’s Republic by daring the central government to block its Chinese-language search service based just beyond the mainland’s borders. Google’s chief legal officer wrote, “We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.”

The “legality” issue is the one that Google has decided to use in this fight. China will almost certainly view that as academic. It has, as the central government has made clear, the right to block any content sent over the internet to any computer or wireless devices based inside its borders.

China said it had shut down or blocked 15,000 pornographic sites earlier this month. It is not clear how many of those that were blocked are based outside China, but the nation has regularly worked to keep pornography off the internet no matter where it originates.  The Supreme People’s Court ruled that distributing  pornography can be punished by life in prison. China has a history of periodically blocking Western news sites as well. The government has also blocked sites with content about the dissident Chinese faction, the Falun Gong. China has periodically blocked access to Twitter and YouTube, two of the most visited websites in the world.

Google may believe that China will stick to the letter of a law that provides that websites in China must censor information based on government rules. Sites outside China may not be subject to the same restrictions, Google may argue. The search company may assume that China will not block Google’s Hong Kong site because the world’s most populous nation does not want to be viewed badly in the court of public opinion. China has already shown innumerable times that it does not care what the rest of the world thinks. It began its fight with Google to make the point that it determines what will run on the internet and it will win this fight.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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