In the Washington Post, Huang Yasheng, professor of political economy and business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, presents the case for why Google should not leave China:
Without a vibrant Internet community in China, Zhou [Jiugeng] and Deng [Yujiao] would probably have traded places — Zhou going about his corrupt business and Deng languishing in jail. But the Internet has given China a measure of transparency, accountability and public voice, with an impact far more powerful than decades of 10 percent economic growth, foreign investment and urbanization. Brin is right that China’s political system retains many of the Leninist attributes of the old Soviet Union, but he is wrong to conflate the government’s attempts to enforce those attributes with the actual results.
The Google co-founder, who came to the United States in 1979, when he was 6 years old, complained in the interview that online censorship in China has intensified in recent years. Indeed, according to China Digital Times, a publication based in Berkeley, Calif., the Chinese government maintains a list of hundreds, if not thousands, of banned search terms, with new ones added periodically.
But let’s maintain some perspective. Relative to the total information available on the Internet in China, the number of banned terms is minuscule, no matter how quickly the list expands.
