Censorship in China

I looked at an article in The New York Times, “Google Shuts China Site in Dispute Over Censorship”; and an article in China Daily, “In quitting, Google misses its chance”. Google in China is different from the Google in America. In the U.S., Google is open and uncensored to everyone who wishes to look at it. Any site they want to look at is available for them. History, science, government, or even food is no secret to the people. But in China, the government there is censoring the information that is released to the public. All information on a topic that would make it to the U.S. is not available to see if you were living in China.
In the Chinese paper, it mostly says that Google should have stayed in China and not left on the basis of morals. It says the way to impact the country is to stay and accept the hardship of censorship. Google has “played a significant role in China’s social transformation in the last decade simply by being in the country and making themselves available to the average Chinese. The impact on the people, society and politics from the fast developing internet service should never be underestimated.” The paper feels Google took the easy road by leaving. Staying would have been a harder road, but they could have made a more positive impact on China in the long run.
While in the American paper, they talk about when Google started four years ago, it was hoped that the search engine would help bring more information to the Chinese, even if it was censored, and loosen the government’s controls on the web. Instead the Chinese government has tightened its grip on the Internet in recent years. The fact that Google “cannot exist in China clearly indicates that China’s path as a rising power is going in a direction different from what the world expected and what many Chinese were hoping for.”
The difference in these two stories mainly is about censorship. The Chinese are use to and accepting of censorship, while the US and the free world do not accept censorship and feel it is a moral issue. It was hoped that the Chinese government would eventually loosen their control, but instead tightened it, and sharpened attacks on Google. While both papers agree that the presence of Google in China could have a positive affect in the long run, the tightening censorship control was too much from the US view point, but considered normal to the Chinese.