Some netizens in Beijing have been sending flowers to Google Beijing Office to show sympathy, but pictures and reports about this public action are deleted in most websites including Baidu--the most popular search engine in China. What kind of Internet do we have, we already lost youtube, blogspot, facebook, and twitter, now Google might be gone too.
What pissed me off most are some comments I heard. Some nationalists are saying that Google embodies nothing but western imperialism. Its western value is of no use to us. It, like other foreign forces, is just trying to prevent us from rising as a superpower. Really? So freedom of expression is just a western conspiracy? If people are not allowed to be informed about things that shaped their life, is it better for them? For example, is Baidu a better search engine than Google? Baidu is a company that censored reports like those on the milk crisis or the violent displacements of people for real estate development under the pressure of government officials. Baidu makes its money by ranking the search results according to who pays more rather than relevance.
Some people are commenting that Google is stupid to lose such a big and promising market for political reasons. Yes Google is just a corporation from capitalist America. But it might just believes one thing many Chinese government officials and companies don't understand: that money cannot buy everything.
But Maybe I'm the one who don't get it. Maybe "Don't be evil"--Google's motto--is against our value? Maybe that's what Chinese values mean now: we respect nothing but power and money, we don't need western values such as justice or public accountabilty; we need peace and stability, for that we must get used to submission and delusion.
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