Google Pulling Out of China?

I made a statement on Facebook yesterday that if Google pulled out of China I am not going back either, I meant it.

Well, Google is the first search engine I had ever known, and I could not imagine a life without Google now. Although I had only been out of China in the recent years Google had been part of my life way longer before that. Opening my browser when I wake up in the morning my homepage is iGoogle, then the first thing I would check is Gmail, following by Facebook, website of my uni etc., and I am obviously using Blogger, Google Earth/Maps, Youtube, Docs, Picasa, Wave... The list goes on. I wouldn't deny that I am a fan of Google that I might use more services from Google than many others, thing is it is almost certain that all people who have access to the Internet are using some services provided by Google.

What had enraged Google to have threatened to leave China was that it had found on its servers attacks from China attempting to access Chinese human rights activists' Gmail account. I'm not going to repeat the story so just see here.

It is not just about human rights, it is not just about Google China's proportion in the market did not meet the expectation of the company (It is still substantially profiting), it is more about the conscience of the company, realizing that it is no longer possible to and feasible to cooperate with the Communist government and help them with their censorship while in the end compromising its own users' privacy and rights of speech. Ever since the launch of Google.cn, the company had been through animadvers and pressures from the government, increasing by the year. And many of them are actually traps planted by government and government-run media aiming at detrimenting the public image of Google, Google did nothing and just continue what it was supposed to do. This time however, the Chinese goernment had broken the bottomline of the company.

Towards Chinese people the government is obviously lying again saying human rights was an excuse Google use for leaving China with bad business in a cover, or stating giving up China is giving up half of the world. Well, from what I have seen on the blogs and forums, complains are dominant, mourning that they have to use alternative ways to go around the GFW and continue using Google service, as Google.com will definitely be blocked once Google.cn pulls out of China, alongside with all of the Google services (although many of them are already blocked, such as Youtube and Picasa), and that Baidu will take over the place where Google used to be in. (Well I myself only get on Baidu for free music downloads back in the time, and now I buy CD's or if I really can't find the CD, iTunes. Baidu is a disgustingly greedy company anyway forcing companies to auction on the placement in search results or they would be taken out of the search literally by placement tens of pages back no matter how relevant the content actually is)

Is it China's or Google's loss if Google do pull out from China? The Chinese government would not mind Google pulling out, they might actually be happy 'one less naughty boy' in the country. For the people however, the loss of Google is more than one less search engine, instead it would mean a significant tightening of the internet environment within China, rumours are are already everywhere saying that the Chinese government is planning to switch from a 'blacklist' policy on the Internet, which blocks the blacklisted websites etc., to a 'whitelist' policy which blocks anything that is not registered with the government. I honestly can't imagine internet looking like that, with no voice from outside of the government at all, not even personal websites. It is matter of time that China will cut its internet communication from other countries and be isolated from the rest of the world fearing any criticism of its illegal regime in the first place.

This statement was found on the internet: It is not that Google had given up on China, China had given up the world.

Interesting Shift

I realized this only after I watched 'the Lovely Bones', there is something different from most of the other movies these days: there is no 'politically correct' African background part in this film, instead, they put an Asian girl in as Susie's guide to paradise.

And I do realize there are more movies like this thinking back, 'Eating Out: All You Can Eat', those two illegal immigrants from Vietnam(?) working in Tiffany's nailing salon and Tandy obviously, no African background casts again. I'm sure there's more but I'll stop here.

It is quite obvious that most of such parts given to minors in the movies and TV shows are not necessarily ethnically specific (well illegal immigrants maybe) and sometimes even inappropriate (The one popped right into my head was Gwen in the BBC TV series Merlin because there would have been very rare case of African people 'in the land of myth and the days of magic' let alone being a royal servant and probably Queen later). They only serve as 'politically correct' disclaimer.

My point here is, is there a shifting in terms of 'politically correctness' from African population towards Asian population? If so, does this mean a realization of racism had turned from towards Africans to towards Asians? Or, does it mean Asian immigrants in the Western world are playing a bigger role by the date in the community comparing to Africans?

I am not going to answer these questions because I don't think I know the answer. What I do know is, African people are affecting the culture of Western countries in a deeper way than Asian people do. For example there's Eminem and there's Whitney Houston. But there's no white J-Pop star or Manga artists and there's no mainstream Asian artists in Western countries either, at least none as big as Whitney Houston.

Well, maybe it takes time?

Google Wave

Quite by chance that I got an invitation from a friend on facebook and laid my hands on this thing. I didn't quite understand the concept that I only heard about some friends mentioning it to be quite nice and stuff, I didn't expect much either. But well anyway I went ahead with it and watched like a third of that hour-and-a-half long video. (the length is putting me into sleep but the idea actually quite exciting, that you could do things that are very different and you could actually see a lot of potentials out of Google Wave)

Well I got excited obviously and then I found a big problem here, one that didn't come with gmail when I got the test account: I don't actually have friends to wave with except the guy that invited me and two magically added contact within my I think gmail contact list that had never showed up. It hadn't been a problem in gmail because it's only an email account that you could start sending any email to any people with email addresses, but with google wave, you don't actually have heaps of people to start with because it is a social network and it is invite only... Well like a day and a half after activating you do get a new wave saying that you are now able to invite people, well, 8 people. That's better than nothing but far from satisfying I would have to say, yes I do reckon I will get more invites later but Google Wave is still considered a social tool, and quite dependant on a social network.

In a word I am satisfied with the idea and stuff that come with Google Wave, but not the way that they open for testing like this. I do understand that resources are limited but 'by-invitation' should not be the mode one social network builds up. Facebook did not limit their access by 'invite only', they purchase new resources when it is used up, and btw what is facebook when it gets to the benchmark of 50,000 users? As a giant like Google, Wave should get more resources and open for public testing IMBO.

Well I bet this thing will be banned in China, with its powerfulness that fears its miserable government with potentials way more powerful than current social networks and wikipedia and youtube conbined, literally.