Should Google stay in China?
On Jan. 12, Google announced that, because of a series of sophisticated attacks that seemed to originate in China and targeted the Gmail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists, it would cease to censor the results of searches performed using its Chinese search engine, Google.cn. In March, it began redirecting search queries sent to Google.cn to its search engine in Hong Kong, which is excluded by international treaty from the censorship laws that prevail in mainland China.On April 28, a group of MIT experts convened at the MIT Sloan School of Management for a panel discussion titled “Should Google Stay in China?” Two of the panel members, Sloan professor Yasheng Huang and Xiaojian Zhao, a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, answered the panel’s titular question with an unequivocal “yes”; the other two panelists, David Clark of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and Craig Simons, another Knight Fellow, were less direct...