Google's threat to shut down its Chinese Website and offices over cyber-attacks and censorship puts the government here in the awkward position of choosing between its devotion to restricting information and the possible ire of the roughly 80 million Chinese who use the search engine.
Few political and Internet analysts doubt that China's government will stick to its tough stance and reject Google's proposal to stop censoring its Website.
But Google's audience of Chinese "netizens," a few of whom placed flowers outside the company's offices here in Beijing, is large enough to make the government's likely stance a touchy one.
"This would adversely affect a lot of people, not just the technorati elite that is Western-oriented anyway," said Kaiser Kuo, a Chinese American Internet expert at Ogilvy China. "The government could face a serious backlash this time."
On Wednesday, the Google story was the top trending topic on a Twitter-like microblog situated on the Chinese site Sina.com, with about 60,000 people weighing in, before the conversation was taken down. The overwhelming majority of commenters were upset at the prospect of losing Google's China-based service; some lashed out at the government while others begged Google to stay. A smaller but substantial number wished the company good riddance.
"This will make the extent of Chinese censorship a lot clearer even to ordinary Chinese people who are not aware of it," said Jeremy Goldkorn, who does the blog and runs an Internet research firm. He also runs a Website called danwei.org, which has been blocked since July.
"Many people think Google should negotiate with the Chinese government," said Zhou Shuguang, a blogger who has done investigative reporting across the country and has used the name Zola.
But he said that "the withdrawal from China will wake up more Chinese and make more people discover that China lacks freedom on the Internet and the government has very strong censorship online. There are no benefits to people at all if Google continues to make concessions with Chinese authorities."
The government has backed down once before in the past year when faced with outcries on the Internet. It reversed its insistence that the makers of personal computers sold here install Green Dam, a filtering software. But the software, largely copied from a foreign company, was shown to slow down and damage computers. Huge numbers of people, most apolitical, protested online and the government backed down.
Another Internet campaign aimed at getting municipal governments to make their budgets more transparent has made some progress. The city of Guangdong made its budget more open, as did a district of Shanghai, though the Shanghai-wide municipal government refused.
But businesspeople in Beijing were pessimistic, as were many people at Google itself, about the prospect of a crack in what is known as the Great Firewall of China. "China can't lose face over this, and it's not going to let anybody run an open search engine," said an industry source close to Google.
The government has shut down or blocked thousands of Web sites before. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are all blocked. Just this week, the General Administration of Press and Publication boasted of taking down 136,000 non-registered Web sites and more than 1.5 million pieces of "bad information." It also said that it shut down 15,000 pornographic Websites.
For now, the government has said only that it would seek more information from Google. Just about the only comment in official channels came in the form of a signed opinion article on the People's Daily Website, a style of editorial that does not carry the well-considered weight of an unsigned editorial, which is usually vetted by top Chinese leaders. The article compared Google to a "spoiled child" and said that even if it stormed out of China, it would be back because of the importance of the Chinese market.
