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Google 'may shut down China operations next month'

By Claudine Beaumont | Telegraph

Chinese people ride their bicycles close to Tiananmen gate as a Chinese flag is seen before the opening session of the National People’s Congress in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People early Friday morning, 5 March 2010. Google may shut down its Chinese search engine early next month, according to reports in China Business News.File photo/AP/Gemunu Amarasinghe/China

China Business News cites a source close to Google China as saying the company may pull out of the country on 10 April, and may announce details of its exit strategy as soon as Monday.

Google has already told employees at its China offices that they could move to Google’s US headquarters, or other offices across the Asia-Pacific region, should it decide to end its association with China, but the company has declined to comment on these latest rumours.

In January, Google threatened to pull out of China unless it was allowed to show unfiltered and uncensored search results on its Google.cn search engine. Google also complained that Chinese dissidents and human rights activists had their Gmail email accounts hacked; subsequent investigations by US officials suggest that the cyber attacks originated from a college with close links to the Chinese government.

The report in China Business News suggests that while Google might close its Google.cn search engine, it may not signal a complete end to its business and operations in the country. Experts believe that were Google to exit the Chinese search market, they would be unable to return at a later date, even if rules on web censorship changed. It would mean that Google could miss out on establishing a presence in a country with 384 million web users, leaving the way clear for local rival Baidu to dominate the search market in China.

Google’s decision to launch a Chinese-language search site in 2006 has long proved controversial. The company, whose mantra is “Don’t be evil”, was accused by some of colluding with the Chinese government by filtering and censoring access to websites that discussed banned topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Free Tibet movement, and outlawed religious group Falun Gong.

Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, told Bloomberg that any withdrawal or downgrading of operations by Google in China would be an “individual business act”, and would have no bearing on the overall environment for foreign corporations with a presence in China.

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