It seems impossible to find on Google but I know I remember reading that they refused to operate under Chinese law, so weren't allowed to operate there. IIRC something about them refusing to store Chinese data in China?
Google's official story is that they were struggling with Chinese censorship laws for their entire time operating there. This is during a time period where Google had significantly open internal communication, and was full of people who believed in open internet as a major political stance, so there was significant internal pressure to not follow any censorship laws.
In response to getting hacked by the Chinese military in 2010, Google stopped obeying any Chinese censorship laws, and slowly got itself more and more blocked on the Chinese internet.
However, all of this takes place against a backdrop of Google getting its ass kicked by Baidu, which came out two years earlier than Google, and of course had better Chinese language support the whole time.
That may have been the reason then, but now Chinese privacy laws are strict enough that Google's main revenue stream (selling user data) would be essentially non-existent.
China blocked them all, due to noncompliance with local laws & regulations.
- https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Google_China
More or less the same story for Facebook & Twitter, just differing in how much the firms tried to engage or circumvent before ultimately getting blocked.
Facebook always wanted back in because they wanted to keep growing, but never quite got there:
NYT: Facebook Said to Create Censorship Tool to Get Back Into China / https://archive.is/yN7EuUltimately it's just a question of how much they want it/can accommodate it. LinkedIn operates in China, by not showing certain stuff.
- The Arab Spring. Color revolutions. Google was ecstatic. They were going to spark a revolt in China! Because they were strongly pro-free speech! (how times change)
They were going to tear down China's government with all of their free information about how oppressive it was to live in China, and the best part was that China couldn't do anything about it! Speech wants to be free! :freeze-peach: (how times change)
They were going to pull the rug out from the government that brought a billion people out of poverty and into the modern world, come hell or high water! They were going to put a billion people in a new age of chaos and war and damn anyone who would stop them! LOL they fucked around and found out. Turns out, you can block entire websites off the internet if you want. Google retreated to google.com.hk and huffed in the unique frustration that is a tech aristocracy being told they can't have everything they want. Then it turned out the Arab Spring was a total disaster and Egypt was put in the position of being a few weeks away from starvation. But don't listen to me, let's see the kind of situation they had planned for China.
Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. "We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown" in July 2013, Hayden explained. "We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage."
"General," I remonstrated, "when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!"
"I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian," Hayden replied, without a hint of irony.
And of course, years later, we found that Google were heavily into censorship themselves. Not Chinese style of course! But penalizing sites so hard that they appear on page 134 of search results. Not so different.
On that note, anyone happen to know much about how far grifters like Andrew Tate manage to reach into China? I'm assuming there's some reach, but it's significantly reduced.
