By Adriana Lukas

This has been long time coming - and by long I mean a few months as apparently Google has recalled most of their engineers from China leaving behind skeleton staff in September last year - and yet vastly overdue. The move is surprising as the world got accustomed to 'business' justifications for dealing with totalitarian states - size of the market, encouragement of progress, which in turn breeds freedom, benefits to the oppressed, er, markets. Blah, blah, blah.

In as much as progress is encouraged by competition and customer sophistication, this argument is valid. In as much as these need to evolve in a framework based on the rule of law, lack of corruption, some respect for property rights and notions of individual rights and freedom, it clearly doesn't apply to countries like China. During the Cold War, the detente of the 70s and its aftermath have shown that trading with the communist countries does not have marked impact on their political ruling class. Actually, it does as they are the ones who benefit from any foreign investment and trade. Both Coca-cola and Pepsi were widely available and I do not recall any tangible improvement to dissidents' existence. Fair enough, Google is in business of information distribution and filtering, which is far more relevant to any regime opposition, however, what with compromise and censorship, it has ruled itself out that 'game' some time ago. As for technology transfer and indigenous competition they certainly had a constructive role - Baidu, the local search engine has most of the search market, having learnt much from the likes of Google.

A cynic might say Google has not much to lose by exiting China, the revenue from that market was 'immaterial' by their own account. Let the cynics have their moment. There are enough people and companies who worship Google as the ultimate modern corporation, or simply as a success story, and the signals this move would send can only be good. And long overdue.

Samizdata