Search Engine Censorship in China

Everyone knows that Google is one of the top search engines on the internet and they are a highly respected and established business. Their respect may have gone out the door in China because of what they had done back in 2004. The major search engine decided to give into the Chinese government and Google.cn was censored. Nobody knew that it happened until they decided to use the search engine and tried to search for their daily news. This marks the first time in the history of the internet that a search engine had censored any content. A search engine is supposed to provide its users with the content that they input into the search feature and as of September 2004 this is not what was happening.

One of the main reasons for the cause of the censorship has to do with former leader Zhao Ziyang. Zhao, who passed away on January 15, 2005 was the leader of China from 1980-1987. As a leading reformer who implemented reforms and greatly increased the production of the country, Zhao also fought against corruption. His biggest battle was at Tiananmen Square on May 19, 1989 when he made his most famous speech. He is quoted as saying, “Students, we came too late. We are sorry. You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary. The reason that I came here is not to ask you to forgive us. All I want to say is that students are getting very weak, it is the 7th day since you went on hunger strike, you can't continue like this.” The students were protesting against the economic policies that the government currently upheld. Zhao went on to say in his speech “We are old; it doesn’t matter to us anymore.” He was referring the government, Zhao was still a government official at the time of his speech. This ended up being his last public appearance and one day later he was put under house arrest until his death in 2005. The people in China don’t know this story because of the censorship that China is enforcing. They censored everything because they didn’t want a rebellion against the government. They also didn’t want protesters at Zhao’s funeral on January 17, 2005.

There have been a lot of reactions due the fact that the people of China can no longer freely access the internet. Journalist Wang Hua who uses the internet on a daily bases says, “"It's invaluable for my work, and maybe more so than (in) some (other) countries because getting information by other means can be very, very difficult or just slow." Although China is on it s way to becoming a free society, the country is still considered a dictatorship. The World Wide Web which was meant to provide a wide access of information to everyone can’t even be used freely by the people of China. Google, one of the world’s top search engines has upset a lot of people from around the world due to their actions. Dynamic Internet Technology is one of the groups who have become aware of Google’s actions and are doing research to try and reverse the process. The company is against the censorship of online activity and chief executive officer Bill Xia says, “That's a problem because the Chinese people need to know there are alternative opinions from the Chinese government and there are many things being covered up by the government.” The company believes