Page 41 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

ruption, and the other was jailed in 2005 for 10 years for blasting human
rights abuses in China.
While agreeing to censorship, Google has built in some safeguards to
protect users’ privacy. Google.cn comes without any blogging or e-mail services.
Without access to the names of individual users, Google isn’t forced to turn over
identities to Chinese officials. By contrast, Baidu offers both blogs and e-mail.
Google provides Chinese users two options besides the censored site: the
original, uncensored Chinese-language search engine run from California,
although with unreliable service and occasional blocks, and the standard
English-language www.google.com that is available worldwide. My searches
on the English site in China have been quirky, however. Queries about
innocuous business topics occasionally have turned up blank screens. A
couple of times, my searches were redirected mysteriously to Baidu.

Google’ s China plan

In October 2006, I hear Google’s side of the story from Kai-Fu Lee. Google’s
towering new headquarters in Tsinghua Software Park are hard to miss. Entering
the lobby during a warm afternoon, I admire a giant Google Earth digital map
of the area. The Google map service exists in China as an online Yellow Pages
directory, but a rollout is planned soon for mobile phones. I can’t help noticing
Google’s strategic location between Beijing University and Tsinghua University.
Here it can tap the top engineering graduate students, and it does.
I’m escorted into a white-walled, sparsely decorated conference room.
Google is not giving away any trade secrets here. Now that Google has oper-
ations in China, Lee tells me he’s confident Google will catch up. He outlines
a step-by-step strategy. “First, build a world-class team, use that team
working with rest of our world R&D teams to build a world-class product,
use the quality of the product to win traffic, and then, with that traffic, will
come revenue,” he says. “That’s how we’ve done it in the United States, that’s
how we did it in Europe, and that’s how we’re going to do it in China.”
Lee says that Chinese search users instantly gravitate to the new site once
they recognize that it is clearly better. “We have a competitive product now,
and we are certain we will have a superior product in the very near future,”
he says.

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