Educational Media Reviews Online

When Internet giant Google ventured into China, people speculated if it was primarily motivated by the huge Chinese market, or spread a freer notion of information access to a society whose Internet access has been strictly regulated by its government. With regard to the latter, Google pushed the envelope and experienced significant pushback from the Chinese government.

The film begins with some insights by authors, analysts, and corporate executives on Google’s motivations in bringing the Western or “Google” model of the information age to China. It then turns into something of a corporate culture case study, examining the internal workings of Google workers. This examination continues on to Baidu’s corporate culture. This chief competitor of Google in China has a surprisingly Apple-esque corporate culture.

The filmmakers move to a skillful dissection of Google’s global strategy and national initiatives. The troubles it faced in China included consumer-end censorship and the “Great Firewall of China.” The film offers eye-opening examples of searches (on Chinese soil) in both Google and Baidu for “Tiananmen Square,” “Dalai Lama,” and names of political dissidents. Baidu’s search results for these terms offered sanitized results, whereas Google search results were blocked or redirected to China-sanctioned sites. Furthermore, the Chinese government insisted on access to Google data. This came to a head in 2010 when Google suffered a massive cyber-attack, believed by Google to have been engineered by the Chinese government. Google promptly moved its servers to Hong Kong, and, after repeated frustrations with the Chinese government, withdrew from China, leaving a ghost of its former presence.

The film goes well beyond simple blow-by-blow accounts of the conflicts between China’s government and Google, and explores deeper questions, such as the role of free access to information in democracy. Moreover, the film calls into question how information moving around the world at large is redirected through government agencies in the United States and China for data collection and storage.

In a time when Internet surveillance is an evolving and hot topic in the US, this is a superb and timely work one may use to gain a grasp of the issue in an international context. Although the title may believe that the film is primarily about Google, the filmmakers present the Google episode as a study of the larger issue of international security of online information, both public and private. It may also serve as a cautionary tale for those contemplating a business enterprise in mainland China.