Before Google announced their high-profile relocation of internet search service in Chinese language from google.cn to google.com.hk, few if any bothers to take note of the nuanced cultural and political distinction between Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (hereafter HK) and People’s Republic of China (hereafter China). HK is part of China, and China is amassing more power. End of the story.
Thanks to Google, who saw the opportunity to take advantage of the geo-political dynamics between HK and China, HK and China is put on the map again. What happened exactly? A brief summary begins with Google’s formal complaint of the hacking into their mail servers by third parties (allegedly connected to some government-appointed scams and malwares) in China in January. Then this incident of internet security turned into one of human rights violation because the mail boxes who were illegally accessed are the accounts of human right activists in China (Who count as a “human right activist” anyway?) The latest gambit Google made to the current standstill is to redirect all the search services in Chinese language to google.com.hk. Since media censorship policy does not apply to HK, an offshore jurisdiction to the Great Fire Wall in China, Google figured out this is a good way to stop self-censorship while maintaining its image to provide uncensored services to users in China.
In their official blog (www.googleblog.blogspot.com) dated 3/22/2010, it is stated,
“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.”
A tinge of martyrdom huh? They are the good guy who sacrifice by abandoning the lucrative internet markets in China because they don’t want to compromise their humanistic principles. And unlike the villainous Chinese government, they genuinely care about the freedom of information for people in China. So they adopt the meet-me-half-way policy. In this case, meet-Chinese-google-in-HK.
Look carefully. Google is right that this decision allows them to stop self-censorship in their Chinese search engine, but what they deliberately omitted is that this move does nothing to improve the right of access to prohibited materials to internet users in China while slowing down (and may even threaten) the current access to google.com.hk by users in HK. Why? Because of its status as a separate jurisdiction, contents in google.com.hk is filtered to the same extent as anything contained in google.com or google.com.uk. In other words, uncensored materials on google.com.hk will be censored whenever the site is accessed in China. At the end of the day, I don’t see how this solution can “meaningfully increase access to information for people in China.”
What’s more problematic is the game Google is playing with the concept of “people in China”. By lumping “people in (mainland) China” and “people in HK” together under the rubric of “people in China”, Google can legally tell the world that they manage to provide uncensored search materials to “people in China”: that is, “people in HK” but not “people in (mainland) China” because of the logistics I described above. Should we give Google benefits of the doubt and excuse them for an honest mistake? I wish I could. But this is in no way a mistake but an intentional attempt to mislead the world by dodging behind the generic term “people in China”. Google is smart enough to take advantage of the separate jurisdiction of HK for their business migration so it is impossible that “HK” and “(mainland) China” mean the same thing to them. Whether they recognize and respect the differences between “people in HK” and “people in (mainland) China” is another matter. As long as someone in China (whether it is HK or Beijing) who can read Chinese can launch an uncensored search in Chinese (regardless of the result), Google cannot care less about the ramifications to the internet communities in China, aka, “people in China”.
It is not the first time Hong Kong was used as a battlefield among rivalry imperial forces. The Japanese occupied HK in 1941, getting on the British nerve until their defeat in 1945. The celebrated phrase during the British reign– “a borrowed place on borrowed time”–captures how the Britons see Hong Kong. The return to the motherland in 1997 was taken to symbolize an end to centuries of British colonization, but it is rather ironic that the welfare of the city-state is continuously undermined by a foreign force; this time in the name of free trade and freedom of information, and for whom? “The people in China”.