On Monday, Google is expected to announce that it will formally withdraw all of its services from China after a two-month stand-off with the Communist government over complaints of internet censorship, reports China Business News. For Google, this means not just walking away from the world’s largest internet market but also a loss of billions of dollars in an unexplored, online advertising market. Businessweek reports that a pullout would sideline Google in China, a country that JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimates would account for $600 million of the company’s sales this year. Out of China, Google would now have to redouble its efforts in gaining market share in South Korea and Japan, where the internet giant has lost out to local competitors.
Even as Google takes the high ground in China over censorship, the authorities’ high-handed behavior over another case, titillatingly called “The case of the Karaoke Singer” has managed to get the Press, Activists and indeed Chinese talking about censorship.
It all started when a reporter for the commercial affiliate of party newspaper People’s Daily asked the Governor of Hubei province, Li Honzhong, a question that would pass as probing in Western news conferences. The reporter, believed to be Liu Jie, asked the Governor outside a conference chamber at the Great Hall of the People for his thoughts on the case of the 21-year old karaoke waitress who had fatally stabbed a local party official when he and his friend tried to force her into sex. The New York Times reports that despite official efforts to suppress the scandal, the waitress’s arrest on murder charges incited online fury, drawing worldwide attention and turning the waitress into a national hero. The charges were reduced, and she was freed without serving a prison term.
However, on hearing the question on the prickly scandal, the Governor erupted at the reporter, asking her to identify which paper she wrote for. On hearing that she wrote for the party mouthpiece, People’s Daily, he charged at her and grabbed her recorder and left, according to the independent Beijing magazine Caijing. The report on Caijing’s website lasted less than 24 hours, before being pulled off by Chinese authorities. However, a protest letter about the incident has been making the rounds, garnering more than a 1000 signatures–calling the legislature to investigate the Governor’s actions and ask him to resign. However, experts are skeptical of any harsh punishment being meted out to one of the party’s own, writes The Times.
The fate of the reporter too is unknown. The Times writes that prior to the meeting at the Great Hall, the Communist party handed out a long list of topics–off limits for reporters. The list included ‘not publishing bad news on the front page,’ staying away from reporting on the poisonous cowpea incident in which cowpea poisoned with toxic pesticide was shipped for use across China and more importantly, also placed the case of the Karaoke singer off limits.
Guess the reporter never got that memo.
But one can presume Google did and refused to drink the kool aid.
