Still a lot of angry rhetoric, and mischaracterizations. Your question isn't a question. It's an assertion. Calling it an question is a lie. I however am not lieing, I'm drawing conclusions from what I know, and what I've learned. I'm more than happy to explain my reasoning.
The Chinese government does not seemed to have loosened their restrictions controlling the media.
The Chinese government is trying to extent that control into new areas that are replacing the old media.
However, at the same time they are making an incredible effort to drag their economy into the 21st century.
In order to do that China has had to loosen the control on people and allow them to be trained and educated. I taught engineering labs while I was in grad school. We had a lot of Chinese students. Most stuck together because their english wasn't very good, but they we still exposed to other cultures. The learned that the way their government silences dissent doesn't happen everywhere. They are getting exposed to more information so they can make informed decisions for themselves.
My brother in law works for a company that has fallen into the trap of manufacturing products in China. The built a manufacturing facility there and took advantage of relatively inexpensive labor, and very good tax incentives offered by the Chinese government.
Part of the agreement they made was with the Chinese government is to not only manufacture products there, but that a significant portion of the design must be done in China as well. Now that company is having to train Chinese people to learn how to design those products. This is VERY bad news for us. However, it does expose the Chinese people to other people who haven't grown up in a land of thought control, or at least not as rigid of one de pending on your view on though control in the US.
A hobby of mine is Caving. I know a group of people who recently organized an expedition to China to explore caves there. They didn't spend a lot of time going around and seeing what the government want foreign tourist to see. They went to remote areas end explored caves and interacted with people.
They weren't going there to try and make any kind of political message, but by going there an interacting with the people there the do so to some extent anyway.
I play on-line games. I interact with Chinese people pretty regularly there.
China isn't as closed of a Country as they once were. They have had to open up some to encourage foreign investment. They have had to loosen control in exchange for the information and investment with which to build their economy. At the same time they are building up their military and they are becoming a serious economic threat to the US. However, at the same time the changes are becoming a serious threat to the control their government has over their people.
Their government is still working to maintain that control, and seem to be being quite successful.
So what can we do to help the Chinese people?
We also need to ask what we can do to protect our own country from the very real threat that China poses to our way of life.
The problem is that the answers to those two question quite often push us in the opposite directions.
That is the myth you and most liberals wish to perpetuate, that more trade has and will help China "soften" and "loosen" and not be the human rights thugocracy they "were".
I'm not a liberal and I don't simply regurgitate the talking points of others. I think about what I'm told. I use my knowledge to guage it's credibility. I think things out logically. I seek out new information. I then come to my own conclusions. Those conclusions aren't always correct, which is why I'm willing to listen to the reasoning of others and try and learn.
However you aren't presenting reasoning. You are asserting that you are right and anyone that disagrees with you are liars, apologists, sympathizers. Not because you are willing to argue your point. You don't argue your point, you attack the people that disagree with you.
It hasn't worked that way and the only thing strengthened by our enormous trade deficit with Red China is their military budget.
The standard of living in China is way below that of most industrialized countries. They live in oppression. However, the widespread poverty and starvation that they lived with a generation ago is mostly gone.
They are still oppressed, they are still relatively poor, but they have something they didn't have a year ago, they have hope.
I was talking to my brother in law about the Chinese people over the holidays. I told him that I thought as their economy's growth would likely stumble as they grew like the Japanese economy did and while they would be a large player in the world economy, they wouldn't unseat us.
His response was that he's worked with both the Chinese and Japanese people. They Japanese have a societal arrogance that restricts them. The Chinese on the other hand are hungry to learn, they are hungry to grow, they are aggressively looking for ways to succeed.
So what's the goal here regarding Google?
Are we trying to help the Chinese people? Are we trying to fight thought control?
Google because it's value lies in it's honesty.
Google provides access to information. Much of it is honest and truthful, much of it is not. Providing people with unrestricted access to information is ideal. It gives people a better opportunity to stumble over the truth. However, the real tool for fighting thought control isn't merely providing information, it's teaching people to think for themselves.
We have much more access to information here in the US yet there are many, many people who follow people blindly that tell them what to believe.
Right now the Chinese people are getting much more widely educated. They are learning problem solving skills. They are learning to question things. They are learning to look at what they know and what they don't know in order to solve a problem.
Ideally google would be able to geive them access to all the information on the internet so that they could more easily figure things out for themselves. However, we don't live in a perfect world. Google cannot just do whatever they want in China. The cannot overtly break the Chinese laws, and it's rather difficulty to do at all, because their own publicly available search tool is what would be used to verify that they are following hte law.
That pretty much leaves them with the option of following the horrible laws in China and providing content that is being censored, or not operating in that market.
So once again I will ask, which choice better serves the Chinese people.
The issue doesn't boil down to your choices no matter how many times you limit the possibilities and demand an answer to the choices you have determined exist.
Fine. By all means come up with other viable option. However, don't justify them based fake all or nothing premise.
Google can't provide completely unrestricted access in the US. They can't provide completely unrestricted access in Europe.
They restrictions in the US and Europe aren't nearly as horrible as those in China, but the point is that Google has to make a judgment on if the censorship they have to work under legally is enough that they should not do business under those laws.
So what tangible guidelines do you suggest they use?
If it's all or nothing, every search engine in the US and Europe should close their doors and go out of business.
Once you give up the all or nothing stance, it gets a lot harder to determine the right thing to do. I would think that if you're trying to do business in China, and it's censorship you're concerned with that your guideline would be doing what is best for the Chinese people.
So is it better for the Chinese people if Google offers the service they can offer under Chinese law, or if they offer no service at all?
Do you think that there's no value to the Chinese people to give them a search engine with both you and them knowing that the results are censored for political reasons?
What is the harm in doing so? The government can develop their own search engine as well. It won't likely be as good as Google's is currently, and it will be censored at least as much.
It's statements like this that precipitate emotional response because they are not really worthy of a rebuttal.
I know of no restrictions on the search engine Google except those that might involve criminal activity, i.e. child sexual exploitation and pornography.
These so-called restrictions do not involve free, non-criminal speech in any way. (Perhaps plans for making nukes are banned, I would hope so and could care less). You have repeatedly brought up the notion that there is restrictions Google has placed on itself in the U.S.
You are wasting my time with your arguments that speech isn't entirely free in the U.S. via Google because you can't, in essence, yell fire in a crowded theater.
You somehow believe that the interactions between Chinese and americans have loosened the restrictions on free speech and that is a dangerously false notion that flies in the face of the reality of widespread detention and slaughter of civilians occcurring as I at this moment am freely posting on the internet.
I know an american businessman who travelled the world on behalf of several motion picture companies as a cartel, and offered those companies movies on a "take this package of all of these companies as a package regardless of what you want, or leave it." They ALL took it.
If all of the internet companies, search engines, web sites, anyone on the internet, takes the postion, as an association--"Take us all, or leave us all." they will have the power to take on the Chinese thought police.
There may also be technological remedies for Chinese current thought police actions.
What isn't accpetable is to deceive the Chinese people, which is what they are doing, particularly when they deny Tianamen Square, when they redirect every searching Chinese Christian, or person curious about Christianity, to a site maintained by the Red Chinese thought police, and probably many other outrageous acts of propoganda and/or censorship. Google is operating in a free county, America, the United States of, and plenty can be done to change the wholeslae capitulation Google is engaging in with the the Red Chinese government thought police.
Of course it is, a parody of your own assertions that culminate in demanding that I choose between two of your assertions which you would have me accept as truth.
There are not just the two choices you assert. Sorry you didn't get the parody.