"Nobody really knows about the timing because this is speculation by a couple of media outlets, but it does seem inevitable that they will pull out with their specially censored Chinese search engine because Google has announced that they're not censoring it anymore and the government here has announced that they cannot accept an uncensored search engine," McGregor, who's been in China for more than 20 years, told Voice of America. "So, it's just a matter of when, not if."Speculation and analysis of Google's threatened exit from the country after five years is rampant in global media (a Chinese report said Google's leaving on April 10) after the company said it will no longer censor search results, which the Chinese government is demanding.
The Washington Post today noted the search engine has become "embedded" in the lives of Chinese users. Google has one-third of the 350M Internet users there and the Post noted hundreds of officials have Gmail accounts.
"If Google is blocked, we will see nothing but darkness," a Yuanye, a 55-year-old biologist based in Kunming in southwest China, told the Post.
Courtney Hohne, a Google communications executive formerly with OutCast Communciatons, said via VoA: "We are indeed in active discussions with the Chinese government, but we are not going to engage in a running commentary about those conversations."
The government's dust-up with Google has implications for all of the foreign businesses there, says McGregor.
"There's been a lot of media and a lot of unhappiness demonstrated by foreign biz [business] here in the last few months, and the Chinese government is now paying attention to it," he said.