The flowers left by free-speech advocates have gone; in their place has come disillusionment. “We came here because we believed that the internet could help open China up. But now we're effectively giving up,” says an employee at Google China – which last week threatened to quit the country in protest over a wave of cyber-attacks – who has started looking for a new job. “We are saying here's the global internet, and there's China, and that's two different things.”
To many internet industry executives, that is old news. “We have a very differently flavoured internet here,” says Calvin Chin, the Chinese-American founder and chief executive of Qifang, a student loan website in China. “Things ... are going to remain different and mature differently. So it's like different islands at Galapagos.”
Since China allowed the first internet connection to be established 16 years ago, global attention has been focused on how the web is changing the country. To those in the west who saw the web as an inherently open and free medium, it could only be a matter of time before the reactionary forces of censorship and authoritarian control succumbed to the inevitable.