Former Google China exec and tech giant Kai-Fu Lee sat down recently with Techonomy founder and Forbes contributor David Kirkpatrick to answer questions about everyone's favorite heavily monitored micro-blogging platform -- Weibo. more ›

Some server error has severely pranked the mainstream international media. Google declared itself blocked in China for all services except for Gmail sometime early this morning. Strangely enough though, everyone actually in China was still able to access everything they'd been able to access before. more ›

As the death toll of the Qinghai quake continues to climb to over 600 people, China’s leaders, diplomatic friends and….well, even its foes are stepping up to the plate in the name of relief services. The most unexpected of helpers? Google. more ›

Try searching for anything inane at all on Google.cn or Google.com.hk (otherwise known as the "new home of Google.cn") and you will now get a connection reset. We tried searching for "shanghai" and all we got was the white screen of death. more ›

All those weeks of talks finally came to a head early this morning, as Google stopped censoring its search results in China. Instead of google.cn, users are being directed to an uncensored version of google.com.hk in simplified Chinese. On the company's official blog, Google’s Senior Vice President David Drummond says that routing through Hong Kong is a legal move, although the Chinese government can still block access to the site. By doing so, Google can continue to offer its search engine to Chinese users outside the jurisdiction of mainland Chinese law, a move the WSJ quotes a source as saying seems to be an “elegant solution if it were to hold,” but China will most likely not allow it to continue. more ›

Some time around 2.50am this morning, Google turned the plug off G.cn and Google.com.cn, and redirected users to Google.com.hk with this message "欢迎您来到谷歌搜索在中国的新家" ["Welcome to the new home of Google Search in China"]. Users in mainland China using Google.com also reported being automatically directed to Google.com.hk (we found this to be true on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari. Chrome did not direct Google.com to Google.com.hk). Using the Google search bar on Firefox and Internet Explorer also returns results through Google HK. more ›

"The Internet is a tidal wave that is going to be impossible for anyone to keep out," Twitter co-founder Evan Williams was quoted as saying during an event at SXSW in Austin, TX. "In places like China it is hard to say how long those firewalls will be able to hold up." more ›

The big piece of news over the weekend is that Google is now, in fact, 99.9% certain it will be shutting down its China search engine operations after negotiations... well, didn't go so well? more ›

We've documented the will-they-won't-they saga of Google possibly leaving China over hackers and censorship and what not. And then we documented the are-they-aren't-they saga of Google and China talking their problems out. Well, at least Google's CEO thinks both parties are going to reach a conclusion soon: Eric Schmidt told reporters at a media summit that "We are in active negotiations with the Chinese government... something will happen soon." more ›

The reason? Probably not directly the ongoing 17th National Congress in Beijing, then they would have blocked the site last week already (unless someone right now uploaded some video's that would upset the government). I suspect the real reason might be that YouTube just launched a Chinese version, which would make the site much more accessible for Chinese users. Not a very smart idea to do that in the middle of the National Congress, and I am surprised nobody at mother company Google's China offices rang an alarm bell about this before the launch. A typical example of the mistakes foreign companies make while trying to do business in China. more ›

We had a good laugh when we saw this "patriotic" banner by Chinese blogger Xiucai ("秀才") which reads: "Joyfully welcome the 17th Party Congress, building a harmonious society together. Xiucai is a good comrade. This site has temporarily shut down comments and forum features." [h/t to Rebecca Mackinnon] more ›

Watch this video clip of the poor receptionist girl working at Google China getting harrassed by a guy, Zola Zhou, (once) billed as "China's first citizen reporter". Zola first gained widespread attention for his blog reports on the Chongqing nailhouse. Hungry for more success, he also went to Xiamen to report on demonstrations against Haicang PX. Hell, he even got interviewed by NBC. more ›

and you can also see what it looks like in the picture above. The stock mania and the get-rich euphoria seems to be the topic on everyone's lips these days, and Chinese university students are no exception, which is why the Ministry of Education recently issued a statement saying that university students ought to be concentrating on their studies, rather than playing the stock market. more ›

From wodingg.com we discovered that Google China (soon to be China Google?) has come out with a new search engine function called Google Sheng Huo (生活), which you can use to search for stuff like housing, jobs, and stuff to buy. Basically what it does is to gather results from other websites and search engines. more ›

This report in the Chinese press first caught our attention regarding the possibility that the top brass at Google.com are rethinking the self-censoring Google.cn engine and their China policy in general. Google co-founder Sergey Brin made these remarks recently on a trip to Washington, DC: more ›

Google, along with Yahoo and Microsoft, has taken a lot of heat lately for its complicity in suppressing free speech in China. What ever happened to "make money without doing evil"? But “things aren’t always as they appear”, as the saying goes. The smart folks at Internet Censorship Explorer have found a backdoor in Google.cn that allows users to get around the Great Firewall. Is it a feature or an oversight? We’ll let the conspiracy theorist in you sort that issue out. more ›

Shanghaiist saw on the China Digital Times a post about the possibility that all Google.com traffic from China being routed to Google.cn, the censored evil twin of the famous search engine. This would mean that you would no longer get crappy Google.com service from within China, because it would no longer exist. CDT picked up this information from this report (in Chinese), which starts off with Google's license issues in China, but if you scroll down, you'll find the paragraph we're talking about. It says that a Google China official said privately to a reporter that the possibility of Google.cn taking over all Google.com directed traffic from within China was a distinct and even likely possibility. We shudder to think, but who's really surprised? Read more about it from Rebecca MacKinnon's website here. On a lighter note, we think Mark Fiore's animation about Western tech companies in China is pretty darn funny. more ›

We meant to write about this yesterday, but decided to play with our dog instead. Blame the pre-holiday malaise. Anyway, now many other blogs have made the same points we wanted to make, so we will summarize ... and then go play with our dog again. more ›