Google's Uncertain Future in China

BEIJING, Jan. 13, 2010 — -- Google has announced that it may end its four-year presence here after discovering an attack on its corporate infrastructure originating from China.

Chinese authorities were seeking more information on Google's comments, an official with the country's State Council Information said in an interview today with the Xinhua news agency.

"It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not," the official said. "Nobody knows."

Reaction to the news on Chinese Internet sites has been mixed. One "netizen" wrote, "If Google leaves, all we have left is Baidu, which is trash. Please don't go!" While another simply wrote, "Just get out."

Baidu is a Chinese search engine.

At Google's Beijing headquarters, a dozen locals reportedly laid flowers on the Google sign at the entrance as a sign of support for the firm.

Chinese hackers apparently targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists within China and abroad in the United States and Europe. Google said the hacking resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google and targeted at least 20 other large companies from the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors.

"We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech," said David Drummond, a senior vice president at Google.

When Google launched in China in 2004, it agreed to censor some search results, a requirement of the Communist government here, leading to widespread criticism that Google was betraying its own company motto, "don't be evil."

Here in China, many Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are impossible to access. Searches for sensitive topics such as "Dalai Lama," "Tibet Independence" or "Falun Gong" usually come up blank. China's largest search engine, Baidu, is privately run but heavily censored. The country's censoring prowess is often dubbed "The Great Firewall of China."