For many young people in China, Kai-Fu Lee is a celebrity. Not quite on the level of a movie star like Edison Chen
or the singers in the boy band F4, but for a 44-year-old computer scientist who invariably appears in a somber dark
suit, he can really draw a crowd. When Lee, the new head of operations for Google in China, gave a lecture at one
Chinese university about how young Chinese should compete with the rest of the world, scalpers sold tickets for $60
apiece. At another, an audience of 8,000 showed up; students sprawled out on the ground, fixed on every word.
It is not hard to see why Lee has become a cult figure for China’s high-tech youth. He grew up in Taiwan, went to
Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon and is fluent in both English and Mandarin. Before joining Google last year, he worked
for Apple in California and then for Microsoft in China; he set up Microsoft Research Asia, the company’s research-
and-development lab in Beijing. In person, Lee exudes the cheery optimism of a life coach; last year, he published
“Be Your Personal Best,” a fast-selling self-help book that urged Chinese students to adopt the risk-taking spirit
of American capitalism. When he started the Microsoft lab seven years ago, he hired dozens of China’s top graduates;
he will now be doing the same thing for Google. “The students of China are remarkable,” he told me when I met him in
Beijing in February. “There is a huge desire to learn.”
Lee can sound almost evangelical when he talks about the liberating power of technology. The Internet, he says, will
level the playing field for China’s enormous rural underclass; once the country’s small villages are connected, he
says, students thousands of miles from Shanghai or Beijing will be able to access online course materials from
M.I.T. or Harvard and fully educate themselves. Lee has been with Google since only last summer, but he wears the
company’s earnest, utopian ethos on his sleeve: when he was hired away from Microsoft, he published a gushingly
emotional open letter on his personal Web site, praising Google’s mission to bring information to the masses. He
concluded with an exuberant equation that translates as “youth + freedom + equality + bottom-up innovation + user
focus + don’t be evil = The Miracle of Google.”
When I visited with Lee, that miracle was being conducted out of a collection of bland offices in downtown Beijing
that looked as if they had been hastily rented and occupied. The small rooms were full of eager young Chinese men in
hip sweatshirts clustered around enormous flat-panel monitors, debugging code for new Google projects. “The ideals
that we uphold here are really just so important and noble,” Lee told me. “How to build stuff that users like, and
figure out how to make money later. And ‘Don’t Do Evil’ ” — he was referring to Google’s bold motto, “Don’t Be
Evil” — “all of those things. I think I’ve always been an idealist in my heart.”
Yet Google’s conduct in China has in recent months seemed considerably less than idealistic. In January, a few
months after Lee opened the Beijing office, the company announced it would be introducing a new version of its
search engine for the Chinese market. To obey China’s censorship laws, Google’s representatives explained, the
company had agreed to purge its search results of any Web sites disapproved of by the Chinese government, including
Web sites promoting Falun Gong, a government-banned spiritual movement; sites promoting free speech in China; or any
mention of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. If you search for “Tibet” or “Falun Gong” most anywhere in the world
on google.com, you’ll find thousands of blog entries, news items and chat rooms on Chinese repression. Do the same
search inside China on google.cn, and most, if not all, of these links will be gone. Google will have erased them
completely.
Google’s decision did not go over well in the United States. In February, company executives were called into
Congressional hearings and compared to Nazi collaborators. The company’s stock fell, and protesters waved placards
outside the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google wasn’t the only American high-tech company to run
aground in China in recent months, nor was it the worst offender. But Google’s executives were supposed to be cut
from a different cloth. When the company went public two years ago, its telegenic young founders, Sergey Brin and
Larry Page, wrote in the company’s official filing for the Securities and Exchange Commission that Google is “a
company that is trustworthy and interested in the public good.” How could Google square that with making nice with a
repressive Chinese regime and the Communist Party behind it?
It was difficult for me to know exactly how Lee felt about the company’s arrangement with China’s authoritarian
leadership. As a condition of our meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government relations;
only the executives in Google’s California head office were allowed to discuss those matters. But as Lee and I
talked about how the Internet was transforming China, he offered one opinion that seemed telling: the Chinese
students he meets and employs, Lee said, do not hunger for democracy. “People are actually quite free to talk about
the subject,” he added, meaning democracy and human rights in China. “I don’t think they care that much. I think
people would say: ‘Hey, U.S. democracy, that’s a good form of government. Chinese government, good and stable,
that’s a good form of government. Whatever, as long as I get to go to my favorite Web site, see my friends, live
happily.’ ” Certainly, he said, the idea of personal expression, of speaking out publicly, had become vastly more
popular among young Chinese as the Internet had grown and as blogging and online chat had become widespread. “But I
don’t think of this as a political statement at all,” Lee said. “I think it’s more people finding that they can
express themselves and be heard, and they love to keep doing that.”
It sounded to me like company spin — a curiously deflated notion of free speech. But spend some time among China’s
nascent class of Internet users, as I have these past months, and you begin to hear such talk somewhat differently.
Youth + freedom + equality + don’t be evil is an equation with few constants and many possible solutions. What is
freedom, just now, to the Chinese? Are there gradations of censorship, better and worse ways to limit information?
In America, that seems like an intolerable question — the end of the conversation. But in China, as Google has
discovered, it is just the beginning.
Google was not, in fact, a pioneer in China. Yahoo was the first major American Internet company to enter the
market, introducing a Chinese-language version of its site and opening up an office in Beijing in 1999. Yahoo
executives quickly learned how difficult China was to penetrate — and how baffling the country’s cultural barriers
can be for Americans. Chinese businesspeople, for example, rarely rely on e-mail, because they find the idea of
leaving messages to be socially awkward. They prefer live exchanges, which means they gravitate to mobile phones and
short text messages instead. (They avoid voicemail for the same reason; during the weeks I traveled in China,
whenever I called a Chinese executive whose phone was turned off, I would get a recording saying that the person was
simply “unavailable,” and the phone would not accept messages.) The most popular feature of the Internet for Chinese
users — much more so than in the United States — is the online discussion board, where long, rollicking arguments
and flame wars spill on for thousands of comments. Baidu, a Chinese search engine that was introduced in 2001 as an
early competitor to Yahoo, capitalized on the national fervor for chat and invented a tool that allows people to
create instant discussion groups based on popular search queries. When users now search on baidu.com for the name of
the Chinese N.B.A. star Yao Ming, for example, they are shown not only links to news reports on his games; they are
also able to join a chat room with thousands of others and argue about him. Baidu’s chat rooms receive as many as
five million posts a day.
As Yahoo found, these cultural nuances made the sites run by American companies feel simply foreign to Chinese users
— and drove them instead to local portals designed by Chinese entrepreneurs. These sites, including Sina.com and
Sohu.com, had less useful search engines, but they were full of links to chat rooms and government-approved Chinese
-language news sites. Nationalist feelings might have played a role, too, in the success Chinese-run sites enjoyed
at Yahoo’s expense. “There’s now a very strong sense of pride in supporting the local guy,” I was told by Andrew
Lih, a Chinese-American professor of media studies at the University of Hong Kong.
Yahoo also was slow to tap into another powerful force in Chinese life: rampant piracy. In most parts of the West,
after the Napster wars, movie and music piracy is increasingly understood as an illicit activity; it thrives,
certainly, but there is now a stigma against taking too much intellectual content without paying for it. (Hence the
success of iTunes.) In China, downloading illegal copies of music, movies and software is as normal and accepted as
checking the weather online. Baidu’s executives discovered early on that many young users were using the Internet to
hunt for pirated MP3’s, so the company developed an easy-to-use interface specifically for this purpose. When I sat
in an Internet cafe in Beijing one afternoon, a teenager with mutton-chop sideburns a few chairs over from me sipped
a Coke and watched a samurai movie he’d downloaded free, while his friends used Baidu to find and pull down pirated
tracks from the 50 Cent album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.” Almost one-fifth of Baidu’s traffic comes from searching for
unlicensed MP3’s that would be illegal in the United States. Robin Li, Baidu’s 37-year-old founder and C.E.O., is
unrepentant. “Right now I think that the record companies may not be happy about the service we are offering,” he
told me recently, “but I think digital music as a trend is unstoppable.”
At first, Google took a different approach to the Chinese market than Yahoo did. In early 2000, Google’s engineers
quietly set about creating a version of their search engine that could understand character-based Asian languages
like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. By the end of the year, they had put up a clunky but serviceable Chinese-language
version of Google’s home page. If you were in China and surfed over to google.com in 2001, Google’s servers would
automatically detect that you were inside the country and send you to the Chinese-language search interface, much in
the same way google.com serves up a French-language interface to users in France.
While Baidu appealed to young MP3 hunters, Google became popular with a different set: white-collar urban
professionals in the major Chinese cities, aspirational types who follow Western styles and sprinkle English words
into conversation, a class that prides itself on being cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic. By pulling in that
audience, Google by the end of 2002 achieved a level of success that had eluded Yahoo: it amassed an estimated 25
percent of all search traffic in China — and it did so working entirely from California, far outside the Chinese
government’s sphere of influence.
The Great Firewall
Then on Sept. 3, 2002, Google vanished. Chinese workers arrived at their desks to find that Google’s site was down,
with just an error page in its place. The Chinese government had begun blocking it. China has two main methods for
censoring the Web. For companies inside its borders, the government uses a broad array of penalties and threats to
keep content clean. For Web sites that originate anywhere else in the world, the government has another impressively
effective mechanism of control: what techies call the Great Firewall of China.
When you use the Internet, it often feels placeless and virtual, but it’s not. It runs on real wires that cut
through real geographical boundaries. There are three main fiber-optic pipelines in China, giant underground cables
that provide Internet access for the public and connect China to the rest of the Internet outside its borders. The
Chinese government requires the private-sector companies that run these fiber-optic networks to specially configure
“router” switches at the edge of the network, where signals cross into foreign countries. These routers — some of
which are made by Cisco Systems, an American firm — serve as China’s new censors.
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