Google in China vs. "China's Google

Google in China vs. "China's Google
" Google's Answer to Its Chinese Question
Google launched its Chinese language version in 2000 and its popularity quickly grew through word of mouth among Chinese Internet surfers. The company did well until September 2002, when Google was blocked by the "Great Firewall of China a political rift over censorship with the Chinese government and was denied rights to China. While Google's company Web site proclaimed, "Google the closest thing the Web has to an ultimate answer machine, it did not have an answer to its one big China question: how can we go into China and yet not do evil?

They [Google] can't afford to not be in China They are facing a hard choice. They really don't want to be seen as doing something that is evil, but no one goes into China on their own terms.
According to Eric Schmidt, Google actually did "an evil scale" and finally reached the decision that "not to serve[ users in China] at all was a worse evil. It was finally granted the rights to open offices in China in January 2005, headed by Taiwan-born Kaifu Lee, a former Microsoft executive, who in 1998 was a founder of Microsoft Research Asia. Several months later, Google introduced a new version of its search engine for the Chinese market by purging its search results of any Web sites of which the Chinese government did not approve.