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16/04/2010 14:02:30 UTC+00:00

Availability of Google's services in China

The availability of Google's services in China has always been difficult since the launch of Google.cn. The reason for this, is that the Chinese citizens don't have the right-to-know. Their government doesn't believe in Freedom of Information, and a lot of Chinese people even think that it's better this way, as they think their government is protecting them by blocking disturbing content.

Google started a Chinese version of their search engine that includes censorship, even though they didn't really like it. Even with Google's efforts, China was blocking their services quite regularly, making them unavailable for the Chinese people.

In December 2009, Google became the victim of various cyber attacks, where some believed that these attacks came from the chinese government itself. The attackers where trying to access accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

Quote from Google's blog:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

China responded by announcing a total blockage of Google's services, starting at the 10th of april 2010.

We're a week past that deadline, and there haven't been any news updates since. Chinese locals told me that they could still access Google Documents and Gmail, so I'm not really sure what has been decided.

In any case, you can check if (and when) Google's services are accessible in China. Google has created a webpage which provides a summary of accessibility to Google services from within mainland China.

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