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 This post comes from Senior Account Executive Li Wang, Q&C’s new “Media Criticism” monthly blogger.

In 2006 I was teaching English to rural, Chinese students in a village called Baojing in Hunan Province.  One night while hanging out at a local café, with waitresses periodically breaking into karaoke song, a muted television screen showed bodies being carted off and President Bush taking to the podium.

Concerned that another terrorist attack had occurred, I went to the local cyber center where teenagers locked into screens playing first-person shooter games.  I crawled into the back row of PCs and found my way to Google.com and CNN.com to find out what was going on.  It turned out the news footage I had seen was taken from a heat wave in France and Dubya was pushing some sort of war escalation initiative.

I had heard of the Chinese government’s Web censorship, so I tested it.  Of course, I couldn’t find the iconic image of the protester in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square, the first image that pops up in an American Google image search.  But I could find everything else that I imagined the Chinese government wouldn’t want its people to see.  Anti-Mao essays, free Tibet sites, Halle Berry’s top-less stills from “Swordfish.”

So now that Google has announced its retreat from China for the government’s hacking into Chinese dissident’s and certain corporate e-mail accounts, applause from human rights activists has been plentiful.  Certainly Google has made great strides in its PR push to quell the notion that it’s a soul-less entity taking over the world.  The company wants to be perceived as a champion of human rights.

Well, Google, get over yourself.

Bill Gates said on Good Morning America, “The Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited.  It’s easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important.”

Google said last week it wants to remain in China, but wants to end censorship of search results.  Good luck with that one.

Withdrawing from China will simply allow your competitors like Bing.com to gain more ground there.  The move would also hurt China’s development towards becoming a global tech leader.  The World Wide Web is too infinite and malleable to be stopped.  Pulling out of China will just hurt the average Chinese citizen, who has been finding ways to get around government restrictions long before Google was around.

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