Don't be evil.

News story of the day: Google is no longer complying with Chinese censorship, and is threatening to pull out of China entirely!

Here's Peter Foster on what this all means, and why booting Google would be bad for China.

Here's Blake Hounshell on the larger geopolitical implications.

Here's Sarah Lacy on why Google's move is about market share far more than it's about human rights.

Here's some responses from Chinese netizens.

To me, the most significant story here is this: The notion that economic openness leads to civil liberties has just heard its death knell.

For decade now, American businesses eager to slash costs (by moving to a country with basically no environmental or worker safety protections) have told us that the best thing we can do to get China to give its people more freedom is to "engage" the country through trade and investment. Increased wealth, they said, would spur the people to demand more freedoms from their government. And exposure to outside ideas and people would broaden the horizons of a Chinese populace used to centuries of authoritarian rule. It sounded plausible enough.

And indeed, the theory was not entirely wrong. Chinese people do have more freedoms and broader outlooks today than they did 20 years ago. Be patient, said the American businesses. Things are changing, just very slowly. Even Google, with its corporate motto of "Don't be evil," jumped on the bus, accepting Chinese censorship in exchange for market share and justifying this move by shrugging and saying that access to some information was better than access to none.

But as the years dragged on, a very different truth began to make itself apparent - China's modernization was in many ways deepening the regime's control. A vast (but relatively cheap) array of internet censors and snoops has allowed China to stifle speech and nip opposition movements in the bud to an unprecedented degree. And the economic modernization enabled by America's openness to China has firmly entrenched the popularity and legitimacy of the ever-ruling Communist Party. In sum, any chance the world had to push China toward being a free society while the country was still poor has been irrevocably lost. If China is to become free, it will do so after it becomes rich - which, given its huge population, is still a long way off.

But that's not the end of the story. Other countries are standing behind China in the development queue. Most of these, like Turkey, Indonesia, South Africa, and Brazil, are reasonably democratic, open societies, but have the option of being more or less repressive of civil liberties. And then there are authoritarian societies like Iran, who look to the "China model" as a ray of hope. Will we (the rich world) ignore these countries' choices, establishing trade and investment links regardless of their internal affairs? Or will we learn from our experience with China, and realize that there is often a clear tradeoff between cutting our labor costs and promoting our values abroad?

One thing is clear: the "China Fantasy" is dead. Stick a fork in it.

Update: Well, not quite dead, if the writings of fatuous NYT columnists is anything to go by. Nicholas Kristof writes:

[V]ision and leadership in China have come from its Netizens, who show none of the lame sycophancy that so many foreigners do. In their Twitter photos, many display yellow ribbons to show solidarity with Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese writer recently sentenced to 10 years in prison. That’s guts!

China’s Netizens scale the Great Firewall of China with virtual private networks and American-based proxy servers like Freegate. (The United States should support these efforts with additional server capacity as a way of promoting free information and undermining censorship by China and Iran).

Young Chinese also are infinitely creative. When the government blocks references to “June 4,” the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Netizens evade the restriction by typing in “May 35.”

When I lived China in the 1990s, an early computer virus would pop up on the screen and ask: Do you like Li Peng? (He was then the widely disliked hard-line prime minister.) If you said you didn’t like Li Peng, the virus disappeared and did no harm. If you expressed support for him, it tried to wipe out your hard drive.

Eventually, I think, a combination of technology, education and information will end the present stasis in China. In a conflict between the Communist Party and Google, the party will win in the short run. But in the long run, I’d put my money on Google.

Um...news flash, buddy. Google lost. When Google entered China in its censored form, Kristof was blithely exultant about how China's "netizens" would use the pseudo-Google to increase their freedoms. Now Google is packing up and leaving the country, and Kristof is saying that this will encourage Chinese netizens to use their talent and genius to increase their freeoms. Well, I guess blind optimism is easy and pleasant.