Notes From Xi'an 西安随感

Now, if we can consider Google a “smart horse”, and why wouldn’t we, then according to Zhao Qi Zheng, Google will be galloping freely (again) in China before too long. Zhao, a spokesman for the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, recently inverted the famous Chinese proverb (WSJ): ‘a good horse will never return to graze on grass it has already passed by’, by noting: “If there is good grass, why give up? A good horse wants to eat good grass. So the horse that returns is a smart horse.” Indeed.

No matter the validity or not of such an analogy, this may be a good moment to introduce the Google founder Sergey Brin’s recent on stage interview at the 2010 TED Talks (see video below). An interesting interview that gave an insight into the issues that Google have been wrestling with and which more importantly, also offered a small insight into the mind of one of the key figures affected by the wild machinations that are going on beneath keyboards across China and beyond.

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I couldn’t quite bring myself to put the name, the word, the verb, or whatever it is in the title, as it has been used so much recently. I will attempt, however, to highlight what a difficult position the Google hierarchy are now in, one certainly not all of their own making but also how the moral as well as profitable thing to do may well be to hang around in the Middle Kingdom for a bit longer yet. However, first a little Google bashing.

For me and my petty concerns, Google went too far when they started incorporating alternative logo styles and random selections of daily information on their .com search engine, presuming that we the masses, in our beautiful diversity, would all be interested in whatever soupcon of news or random image they felt entitled to share with us. However, this didn’t stop me continuing to use their services; my Gmail account, the Google Chrome Browser, my first blog post on Blogger and all the googling I have continued to do. For others, it was the dilution of Google’s border-less approach to information accessibility when they started dealing with China that spelt the beginning of the end. (more…)