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Google's New Approach For China Is To Serve From Hong Kong
abs0lutz3ro writes with a major update to the Google/China situation we've been discussing so much lately:
"Google has stopped censoring simplified Chinese search results on google.cn by redirecting users to google.com.hk, which Google maintains is entirely legal. From the official blog: 'We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced—it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services. We will therefore be carefully monitoring access issues, and have created this new web page, which we will update regularly each day, so that everyone can see which Google services are available in China.' Seems like google.cn got served (from google.com.hk)."
The British already gave .hk back to the PRC back in 2000 (i think that's the right year), so they already have it. It's just maintained as a semi-autonomous "free-enterprise zone" iirc. They don't need to invade it, conquer it or annex it. They just need to enforce the law there in the same way they do everywhere else.
97
China has 5 different types of Autonomous areas: 1) Autonomous banner (in Inner Mongolia) 2) Autonomous County 3) Autonomous Prefecture 4) Autonomous Region. Autonomous region has its own local government with the right to appoint the governer (from the local minority) For example Tibetan people in Tibet, the Zhuang in Guangxi, the Uyghur in Xinjiang, the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and the Hui in Ningxia. 5) Special Administrative Region Special Administrative Regions of China include Hong Kong and Macau. Special Administrative Regions are responsible for everything except diplomatic relations and national defence. So effectively Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal system, completely different from the rest of the country. More importantly unlike in mainland China in Hong Kong it is possible to watch Youtube and use Facebook.
Hong Kong is not like the rest of China. The censorship laws are less restrictive, and the people enjoy a greater degree of freedom.
Palm trees and 8
A lot of things are legal in Hong Kong that are not legal in China.
Just 37 more years to go.
Right. Also remember that a large number of Chinese citizens are on the side of their government, hard to believe as that may be. The prevailing attitude seems to be "they should not do business here if they don't respect our local laws", and moreover many people there see Google as an extension of the US government's foreign policy (state media has played up ties between Googlers and the US government.
Surprising as it may seem, a large, large number (maybe majority, I don't have statistics) are perfectly fine with censorship, and are immensely proud of their country despite its flaws (nationalism strikes again!).
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
If you don't understand the pressure you have when you own one nations debts, please read this Wikipedia article that describes how USA with economic pressure ended United Kingdoms status as world power in 1956:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis
That action of an "allied" power should learn each person how important financial power is and clearly tell you why the Chinese owns USA.
Yes and no. Yes, China officially has some power over Hong Kong. Unofficially, Hong Kong rules itself, and any attempt by China to exert even the slightest power over it would result in uproar, if not uprising.
The strange things are that the mainland cable TV networks (in the southern provinces) carry full TV programs from HK, because they are more popular than the politically correct programs from the mainland TV networks, but block only during the broadcast of certain sensitive news item. Of course, even a fool would tell something bad has happened by this type of blunt actions. And therefore nobody really believes whatever the government is saying. Yet at the same time, majority of the same people seem to agree that (a) social stability is more important than anything else; (b) some truths are better kept as open secrets.
The only good is that the Chinese government's propaganda control is largely still very blunt and kaming it easy to tell it is progranda. When they fully learned American style political marketing and packaging, it would be worse.
Well, no, but he wasn't exactly a freedom-fighter or a lover of civil liberties. He gained power by a military coup and kept it with an iron fist. Look up Taiwan's White Terror sometime. The only real difference between him and Mao was that he was a power hungry conservative that embraced tried-and-true Chinese tradition as his ideological touchstone instead of the murderously destructive interpretation of Communism that Mao adopted. Point being, if China actually chose to create a government that answered to the will of its people, the KMT would be the second-to-last political party that they'd probably call upon to lead them.
True, in no small part because doing so would effectively be a declaration of war against a much larger and more powerful opponent that can obliterate it at will, something which the PRC has made very clear for the past 30 years or so. The only thing keeping Taiwan from getting the Hong Kong treatment itself is the US' insistence, backed with a carrier group or two and considerable military assistance to Taiwan, that the PRC and Taiwan maintain the status quo. Under the circumstances, if I were Taiwanese, I'd find any change to the status quo to be controversial, too, if not brazenly suicidal.
Hong Kong also uses Traditional Chinese, and there are differences in word usages etc between HK written Chinese and mainland written Chinese.
Google have specially made a Simplified Chinese version and are hosting it out of google.com.hk, aimed at mainlanders. When you access google.com.hk from a browser that is configured to ask for pages in Simplified Chinese, google.com.hk delivers you that version.
It even says under the search box (in simplified Chinese), "Welcome to the new home of Google in China!".
For what it's worth, because basically every single post in this discussion is wrong: 1) Hong Kong Google provides uncensored Internet search results. However, the websites themselves are still censored. For instance, using Hong Kong Google won't be a magic way to access blocked porn sites. Really the uncensored results are kind of a pain for normal use, it just means a bunch of broken links. 2) Hong Kong Google isn't anything new to China. Before Google set up a PRC Google, 3 years ago or so, that was the way PRC China users accessed Google. And for the past 3 years, Hong Kong Google has always been accessible. 3) Hong Kong is China, but the government in effect is guaranteed independence until 2047. Obviously there's some caveats and whatnot, but the PRC wouldn't just renege on this and tell HK Google what to do, because it would look bad internationally, and because they'd like Taiwan to agree to something similar. 4) Really, what this will do is slow Google searches by .03 seconds, and search results will provide a lot of links to websites that have been blocked (which if you're searching non-sensitive items in Chinese language, doesn't happen all that often - if you're searching non-sensitive English items, there are a fair number of false positives). I'm guessing a lot of localizations also will be lost or left undeveloped (for instance, Google Maps can tell you which subways to take to get around Shanghai).
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