Numbers released this morning show China surpassing Japan as the second largest economy. China’s weighed in at $1.33 trillion in Q2 with Japan slightly lower at $1.28 trillion, a .0.4 percent growth. If China’s growth remains steady, they are reported to surpass the United States as early as 2030.

While China has roughly the same land mass as the United States, it also makes up a fifth of the worlds population. But China’s medium annual income is a mere $3,600, compared to the United States whose is $46,000.

With China’s huge appetite for oil, coal, iron and other natural resources, it will be interesting in the coming years to see China flourish as a major driver of global growth.

We’ve discussed the topic of Google’s presence in China a couple times, and it looks like it’s time to revisit the topic again.  It appears China has decided to renew its license with Google to continue using its search address Google.cn. In March, Google had begun redirecting search queries from China’s mainland to a version of its search engine that is not censored in Hong Kong.  Google stopped redirecting two weeks after the government indicated it would not renew its license if the company continued this practice.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt commented at a news conference, “Our operations in China are completely at the discretion of the Chinese government.  I don’t want anyone to be confused about that.”

During the standoff with Beijing, Google did lose some of its search share to other rivals such as Baidu.com. Other Google services continue to be popular such as its email service, Gmail.  Other services provided by Google such as YouTube continue to be blocked by China.

Under the renewed license, Google.cn requires visitors to click on an image in order to be redirected to the Hong Kong site for web searches.  Music search features, product searches and translation services have also recently been made accessible from Google.cn itself recently.

It will be interesting to see if the new 2-click requirement for Google will restrict its commercial ability to make the ad revenue it has long profited from.

We all had heard that Google put restrictions on China users because of a potential cyber attack(s) that had originated in China, however now GoDaddy is planning on doing this too. Reuters is reporting that GoDaddy will stop registering domains in China, however will maintain/service the .cn domain names that already exist. “We believe that many of the current abuses of the Internet originating in China are due to a lack of enforcement against criminal activities by the Chinese government,” Christine Jones, Go Daddy Group Inc general counsel, told a congressional commission hearing on Wednesday.”
GoDaddy has seen several attacks that seem to be originating in China, and this has prompted them to join forces with Google to protest China and the potential attacks. This brings up the issue again of internet censorship and companies putting principle over profits? Should more companies think this way and jump on the Google bandwagon, or is this not something fair that these US companies are doing to China?

Google announced today that it will shift its search engine off the mainland but will not close doors completely. Google and China have had an on-going dispute over recent months regarding restricting search results. There had been talks that Google would pull out completely from the Chinese market, however has decided to remain most likely due to its desire to profit from an explosively growing market.

According to the Associated Press, effective this afternoon, visitors to Google.cn are being redirected to Google’s Chinese language service based in Hong Kong. Results on these pages are not censored by Google, but the Chinese government filters can still restrict results that are viewed by mainland audiences.

Google originally set up a search engine in China in 2006. Currently about 700 or Google’s 20,000 employees are in China.

As a follow up to our recent post discussing China’s Internet censorship and regulations, Google has now pulled the plug on launching it’s cell phone in China. Google’s mobile phones equipped with Internet applications were decided by the company to be “not a good experience” for the consumer. Currently, China has over 700 million mobile phone accounts and consumers driven by the latest technology.
According to the Associated Press, it has been rumored that Google has threatened to shut its Chinese-based search engine if the restrictions are not eased. The Chinese government is standing strong on it’s decision that “Foreign enterprises in China need to adhere to China’s laws and regulations, respect and the interests of the general public and cultural traditions and shoulder corresponding responsibilities. Google is no exception,” as stated by a Foreign ministry spokesman at a new briefin
It will be interesting to watch this controversy unfold as many Chinese and foreign businesses rely on Google’s email and maps…If Google is blocked and access is restricted it could certainly disrupt things!

In the last year or so we have talked about the controversy over China blocking certain websites from being viewed by the Chinese residents. Unfortunately, it seems there might be another website “victim” being added to this now long list – Wired.com. There doesn’t seem to be any common factor involved in the websites that this country continues to block, except for the fact that these sites are too dangerous. Currently, the sites blocked are: YouTube, Facebook, the BBC, Wikipedia, Google and a movie information site called IMBD. So does this sort of restriction prevent affiliate marketing from happening in China? Many use some of the banned sites as a source for traffic and some are even working with Leadpile……and WHAT is so “dangerous” about Google? I don’t get it! What will be next?

In today’s era of social networking and free email address accounts, I find this very surprising that China has chosen to ban both Hotmail and Twitter. SearchEngineWatch.com points out a good point that a third of our world’s population lives in China, therefore will this ban affect active users on both Twitter and Hotmail? It’s kinda hard to believe that something like Twitter and Hotmail can be that bad that a government would eliminate it and just throw one’s freedom of speech out the window. I guess China is maybe a little behind the times with allowing people to control their own lives, so I guess this is not totally surprising to me. I wonder how those that live in China feel about this government intervention with their lives? If you live in China, I hope you get Twitter back soon!