Despite serious threats to leave China, it now seems Google is not walking their talk: there are job postings on Google’s Chinese site again, indicating that the search giant is not going to leave China anytime soon. As a heavy Google user I am of course happy about this, because I was worried to lose access to among others my Gmail account and my Google Reader RSS feed.
The story is certainly not over yet, but either Google’s negotiations with the government are going well (which would be very hard to believe), or more likely they understand that their US management made a big business mistake in announcing their departure.
Update: Several media, among others BusinessWeek, wrote about the fact that Google started hiring again, but according to a commenter there is also a report saying that these job posting had been there already before Google’s pull out threat.
See if you can open this link. Anyway, sources familiar with the hiring process point out that these postings were out before the January 12th statement, after “just posted.”
http://www1.voanews.com/chinese/news/china/GOOGLE_20100226-85521552.html
According to NYT, WSJ, google won’t pull out everything from China, just the search engine, or the Chinese part of the search engine. Gmail, google map and other services which have nothing to do with censorhship are here to stay. They still have reason to hire.
Google.cn now directs all search request to google.hk, uncencored. You gmail should be intack. The ball is in Beijing’s court again. Some of the 600 Google’s employees in Beijing may need to relocate though.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704117304575137960803993890.html?mod=WSJASIA_hpp_LEADNewsCollection
Is your blog still blocked?
Yes, my blog is still blocked in mainland China…