As part of a broad campaign to strengthen internal security, the Chinese government has uncovered a dark cloak over Internet communications in recent weeks, a situation that has made it more difficult for Google and their customers to do business.
Chinese exporters have had trouble placing Google ads that appeal to overseas buyers. Biotech researchers in Beijing struggled to recalibrate an expensive microscope this summer because they could not locate the online instructions to do so. And international companies have had difficulty sharing Gmail messages between remote offices and setting up meetings in applications such as Google Calendar.
"It's frustrating and annoying drain on productivity," said Jeffrey Phillips, an executive power of the United States, who has lived in China for 14 years. "You have people who spend their time figuring out how to send a file instead of getting their work done."
The pain is widespread. Two popular messaging services, owned by South Korean companies, and Kakao Talk Line, were blocked abruptly this summer, as well as other applications like Didi, Talk Box and Vower. American giants like Twitter and Facebook have long been censored by China's Great Firewall, a filter system the government has spent lavishly to control Internet traffic in and out of the country.
Although Google and other major technology companies have strongly pushed for an easing of restrictions, the wider scrutiny of multinational Beijing has intensified. In late July, antitrust investigators raided the offices of Microsoft in four Chinese cities to interview managers and copy large amounts of data from hard drives. Qualcomm, a major manufacturer of computer chips and a patent holder of wireless technology, is facing an antitrust investigation separately.
The increasingly widespread blocking of the Web, along with other problems such as air pollution in major urban centers in China, has led some businesses to transfer employees to regional centers with more open and faster Internets, as Singapore. And more companies are considering similar measures.
"Companies overlook the problems of the Internet, when the economy was booming," said Shaun Rein, managing director of China Market Research Group, a consulting firm in Shanghai. "But now a lot of companies are wondering if you really need to be in China."
The CTO of a startup in China said it was particularly difficult to use Google Drive this summer, so it is a challenge for employees to share files and documents.
"We were engaged in collaborative editing," the CTO, who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisals by the Chinese authorities said. "You can edit a Word document or spreadsheet together and everything stays in sync -. Thus our management could track the status of the products they were working"
As a public offering of Alibaba exchange in New York on Thursday showed initial, China has produced many successful Web companies. But many executives and researchers say that a number of Internet services homegrown are poor substitutes for multinational deals.
Jin Hetian, an archaeologist in Beijing, said it was hard doing a search using Baidu, the local search engine that has limitations for searches in English and other languages are not Chinese and offers less specialized functions.
"I know some foreign scientists studying ancient tree rings to learn about the weather, for example, but I can not find your job using Baidu," Jin said. "When in China, I'm almost never access Google Scholar, so I remain uninformed of the latest discoveries."
Kaiser Kuo, Baidu spokesman, said the company focused on indexing websites written in Chinese, since most of his customers are Chinese speakers.
Access to some academic sites abroad also has been blocked. A professor at Peking University was recently unable to provide a letter of recommendation for a student applying to study at a university in the United States because China had blocked the website of the school, said a researcher in physics at the University Beijing who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisals from the Chinese authorities.
Google Issues in China have been accumulating for years.
The company closed its servers in mainland China in March 2010 to prevent online censorship and began directing users in China to get unfiltered results from its servers in Hong Kong. The Chinese government began blocking intermittently Hong Kong servers and in particular by stopping the ability to reach the site for up to 90 seconds if a user tried to enter anything in a long list of banned Chinese characters, including the national leaders of the names and a few words in English.
Google started to encrypt search results and users around the world earlier this year, partly in response to the revelations of former contractor National Security Agency Edward J. Snowden on monitoring the government of the United States. This change by Google - using the Internet addresses starting with "https" - did more difficult for Chinese censors to determine pursuing the types of queries that are discouraged.
But the Chinese government responded on May 29 by blocking virtually all access to Google web sites, rather than imposing delays 90 seconds when prohibited search terms were used. Experts initially interpreted the move as a security measure ahead of the 25th anniversary of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square on June 4, but the block has remained largely in place since.
"Internet security is rising at a much higher level," said Xiao Qiang, an expert on Internet censorship in China at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. "Other priorities, such as trade or scientific research is annulled."
Chinese authorities often allow a small fraction of searches and other activities to go through Google, usually every day, with a slightly higher percentage be completed from mobile devices from other devices. The government even unlock Google for several hours roughly once a month, before relock it.
Because the censors allow a trickle of traffic to get to Google's servers in Hong Kong, many Chinese users keep recharging your Google page and again in the hope of getting through. This is creating an impression among many Chinese users, the media controlled by the state have done little to dispel, that the problem must be in poor quality of Google services and not blocking Google's busiest government.
"We have extensively tested, and there is nothing technically wrong on our part," said Taj Meadows, spokesman at the Asian headquarters of the company, one of the most expensive office buildings opposite the port of Singapore.
Meadows consumers refused to provide any comment on the blockade, except to say that Google is still focused on selling ads for mobile and display in China and in the delivery of ads and other services to Chinese companies seeking to attract global.
China's crackdown on foreign Internet services matches two trends. One is the growing concern in the country for domestic terrorism, particularly after a series of deadly attacks at train stations this year. The other is always growing nationalism, primarily aimed at Japan, but also in Japan allies, especially the United States.
President Xi Jinping of China, who is also the head of the Communist Party, has made clear it wants to maintain the primacy of the party. He noted the importance that places you in control of the Internet, personally taking the top position in the leading party group on cybersecurity.
Internet users have tried any number of solutions in China, with varying degrees of success.
Phillips, the executive power, said some of his friends in China use Outlook email instead of Gmail because email Outlook tended not to be blocked. But he expressed reluctance to change their own email account after seeing the media reports of government attacks on the offices of Microsoft. "What if they block next? You can not constantly change services all the time."
Frustrated users have often resorted to the virtual private network or VPN services to bypass Internet filters in China. But these services have also been subject to concerted attacks by the authorities, who stopped service to them with increasing frequency. Many ordinary people can not afford or access VPNs, for starters.
Meanwhile, Google continues to erode business. Its share of the search market in China fell to 10.9 percent in the second quarter of this year as the stepped-up lock began to take effect - compared to one third in 2009, when he still had servers there.
Google problems extend far beyond search. Its application store, called Google Play, is only partially accessible in China.
That has led to the emergence of a number of locally run application stores, which analysts say is sometimes marketed pirated software or charge extra to promote a new application. Companies often are forced to create versions of their applications to China that are slightly different versions distributed to the rest of the world in the Google app store.
"Because Google Play has low market share" in the Chinese market, "the editors of applications that have worldwide applications in Google Play will not receive a proportionate share of users in China unpublished Android to local shops, even if they have localized versions in Chinese, "said Bertrand Schmitt, CEO of App Annie, a company that tracks the global distribution of applications.
Google also has public access libraries of scripts and source code on their servers, but now China blocks these libraries. The CTO of startup, said his company had resorted to creating their own libraries and welcome them on their own servers, wasting expensive computing power and space.
"We have our own things closed office and host server there," he said. "That's not going to the cloud, it's like going back to the 2000s"
