Two tribes: Google and China

In China, the release of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1984 hit song, “Two Tribes Go To War,” was greeted in a similar vein to the arrival of the internet search giant Google: both were immediate smash hits.

The Google tribe is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable organisations of our time. Through the creative utilisation of cutting-edge technology and innovative business deals, Google’s mathematicians-turned-mogul founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have taken their tribe from academic slipstream to the global mainstream. Every tribe, however, needs a battleground—and for Google that must include the world’s fastest growing and relatively untapped economy: China.

The country is set become the biggest internet market in the world. In attempting to gain a strong foothold in this Midas market (Google still trails local Chinese competitor Baidu by a considerable margin), Google has nevertheless achieved the double bonus of keeping Microsoft at bay as well as having access to China’s perennial army of computer scientist graduates.

But getting so heavily involved in China has presented Google with its own set of problems, and the recent sophisticated attacks on the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists and the 20 plus other companies, highlights this. The Google philosophy of “youth + freedom + transparency + new model + the general public’s benefit + belief in trust = The Miracle of Google”—as famously enunciated by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, a high profile Chinese Microsoft employee who crossed the binary war lines by seeking to join Google—sits very uneasily with the Chinese political equation of “Communist bureaucracy + active monitoring + restriction + censored internet.”



This contretemps, which was always evident from the outset, has now erupted into all-out public warfare. Google is left with a massive problem: go against its founding ethos of omnipresent omniscience, or stick to its guns, resist Chinese censorship and risk losing enormous market share. Google made its war salvo clear last week by threatening that it will cease operating in China. What happens next, both in terms of the persistent problems for large cyber-multinationals such as Google trying to operate in less welcoming, but highly-valuable territories such as China, as well as the already strained US-China relations, is anybody’s guess. One thing, however, is for sure: in the coming days and weeks Google will either be pulling out an e-book version of Sun Tzu’s the Art of War or it will be "Youtubing" a request for Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s other famous smash hit single: “Relax.”