According to the rumor, taxation authorities discovered during a routine audit that Google China had issued fake invoices.
Many former Google China employees lament Google's diminished status in the country.
"What we hoped to accomplish with Google China is now being realized by Weibo, " proving that "engagement is the right approach, " said former Google China chief Kai-Fu Lee, who left the company in 2009.
The former president of Google China saw many of his engineers from the search engine move on to form startups and he became convinced that serial entrepreneurs were a good bet to back.
"People tend to think Google quit China, but China didn't quit Google, " said Duncan Clark, chairman of consulting firm BDA China Ltd, referring to Google's advertising services for Chinese companies who want reach people around the globe.
They include Apple, Baidu (the Google of China) EMC, Oracle, Juniper, Amazon and QualComm.
When Google quit China, it left local search market to rival Baidu.
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GreatFire discovered that said message no longer popped up when searching for various censored terms on Google Search in China, and while Google's confirming that fact, it's unclear what the exact reasoning is.
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This is what Apple has done to Google by choosing China as the best venue in its challenge to Google Maps.
Facebook has not entered China while Baidu competed with Google for several years in China.
That's down from about 700 employees in 2009, according to a former Google executive in China.
Investors looking to play the anti-Google story in China need only to turn to Baidu (BIDU).
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president's friends at Google are hectoring China on Internet policy.
And what was the single most popular Google application in China?
While Apple is having to apologize for the poor quality of its maps in the West, it is clearly superior to Google Maps in China.
America is pressing China to revalue its currency and Google is threatening to leave China entirely.
Microsoft will continue to complain because playing dirty pool is in their corporate DNA. Google has made some stupid mistakes in the last few years (being in China, Google Buzz, poor explanation of capturing WiFi packets, etc.), but compared to Microsoft, they are far better for the consumer in this dimension since Microsoft will do anything and everything to have their way.
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China just blocked them and Google equivocated, then returned to China where its relationship with the authorities remains strained on many levels.
China has also declared that Google is too strong and implied that China wants self-sufficiency in smartphones, right down to the operating system.
In June 2011, Google said it had traced to China a cyberattack that attempted to access hundreds of Google email accounts.
He thinks Facebook ought to have stayed out of China until they could dictate their terms for coming in (and McLaughlin also never thought Google should have gone to China in the first place).
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They analyze the development of Google or Apple in China very differently from how I do.
Several months later, however, China renewed Google's license to operate a website in the country.
But in China, Google believes that even limited engagement with the country is better than none at all.
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