On the (sort of) bright side, few people were probably deprived of the information – it’s not as if Google and Yahoo are all that popular in China. The downside is that both companies seem to have suppressed something yet again. Also, they will soon be sued for doing so.
In this instance, the thing to get removed from search results is Guo Quan. Jane Macartney describes him as “[a] former Chinese university professor who was dismissed after he founded a democratic opposition party.”
Yet in what is both a nice and surprising turn of events, Guo Quan is alive, not in prison, and will be filing the lawsuit himself in a U.S. court. Not everyone who’s had this sort of contact with search engines and the Chinese government has been so lucky.
Now, what’s difficult to say is what will come of the lawsuit; “we feel bad”-style statements have been made in the past, and American politicians have even dealt out some harsh words. But, as the existence of the new lawsuit should prove, nothing really changed, and we hope this won’t be a waste of the former professor’s time and resources.
He has shown some restraint and wisdom; the former professor told Macartney, “[H]e could understand why search the engine Baidu.com, a Chinese company and the locally controlled arm of portal Yahoo!, could have been coerced by the Government to block his name . . .”
Also, regardless of what happens in the future, Guo Quan has already succeeded in redirecting international attention to censorship in China, which may be most of his goal. Our only regret, aside from concerns for his safety, is that Guo Quan doesn’t seem like much of an animal fan. He wrote, “To make money, Google has become a servile Pekinese dog wagging its tail at the heels of the Chinese communists.”
