The whole Google and Chinese government feud is interesting to watch play out because you have one of the world’s most powerful companies fighting with one of the world’s most powerful governments:

When Google finally ended the suspense, it did so by stating the obvious. “Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search [in China],” wrote David Drummond, the company’s chief legal officer on the company’s blog last night, “has been hard.” For more than two months, ever since its Jan. 12 announcement that it would soon stop censoring its search results in the country with the largest number of internet users in the world, the California giant was headed for a direct clash with the authorities in Beijing, who have been repeatedly unambiguous in their stance. Censorship is the law of the land in China, and Google had to abide by it or “suffer the consequences,” as one official put it last week.

Google’s decision is to route all of the traffic on its Chinese search engine, Google.cn, to its Hong Kong based site, Google.com.hk. The company has added simplified Chinese characters to the site (Hong Kong Chinese use traditional characters for reading and writing), and a color coded list of features (shopping, maps, music etc) which are still available, and all of which make it now look “a bit like an eye test,” as Shen Liling, a young Shanghai netizen, says. (See pictures of China mourning the potential loss of Google.)

But the practical result was, for a few hours at least, search results were no longer censored. On Tuesday morning in China netizens could type in “Falun Gong,” the banned religious cult, and what popped up was far different than what popped up just last night. (Among other things, the official Falun Gong website showed up in search results.) So after nearly four years of doing business in China, Google has lived up to its campaign promise. It is no longer censoring its search results for web surfers behind China’s Great Firewall. But it took the Chinese government less than 24 hours to start censoring searches itself: Typing in “Falun Gong” from the mainland later in the day prompted only a “web page not available” response.  [TIME Magazine]

Read the rest at the link, but I wondering if this is just the first of many future trade battles with the Chinese government from major corporations with other issues such as the Chinese devaluation of their currency?  I also wonder how long it will be before the Chinese government starts to crackdown on Google in Hong Kong?