Without knowing the internals of how google.cn works, it’s hard to say if this is really censorship. If so, it looks like a bad job. Should be easy to re-direct all images of Jesus to images of Mao...

On the other wrist, it seems hard (or impossible!) for a Chinese censor to filter through every possible of Jesus on the internet and decide which ones are “good for China”, or whatever criterion they use...

What strikes me as more likely is that Google.cn is trying to find and index things that are relevant to its Chinese audience. And since China is a country who had a rather traumatic introduction to Christianity, perhaps the Chinese themselves aren’t saying that much about Christ...

Then again, a quick search of google.fr gets the same results as google.com. So who knows?

"Google.cn is trying to find and index things that are relevant to its Chinese audience."

I LOVE IT! The most amazing liberal nonsense I've heard this month. Google decides to index what's "relevant." So maybe Google.Nigeria should block all sorts of industrial and scientific stuff, and return results for drums, masks, dancing and rhythym...

Sorry to break it to you, but estimates of Christians in China tend to range from 20 to 100 million, and growing fast. And Mao is only still a hero in places like American unviersities--the Chinese are well aware that his reign was an utter catastrophe.

Reminds me of a story I read in the 80's or 90's, about some Americans visiting China, and the Chinese are cringing inwardly as the Americans praise Mao, and the Americans are cringing inwardly as the Chinese praise Nixon....

I think you misunderstood me.
See, Google.com works as well as it does because it searches the web and then contextualizes results bases on what web users tend to think a given phrase means. So, perhaps not returning a whole lot of Jesus pictures is simply because the Chinese people themselves aren’t saying enough about Jesus for Google to grab very many results...

Let’s see, 20million Christians in China would be 1.6% of their population. 20million would be 8.3% of their population. So Christianity in China is somewhere between Paganism and Jehovah's witnesses in this country...

Now, show me evidence that Buddhism is being censored in some way, and perhaps you’ll have a case...

Andrew,

The point here is NOT what the Chinese are saying about Jesus Christ. The whole world has a lot to say about Jesus Christ, and Google, being as how it returns (here in the U.S., anyway) results from all over the world, should return for Chinese users results from all over the world as well. That it doesn't says that SOMEBODY is rigging the results, returning "hits" that are deemed "appropriate" for a Chinese audience.

Andrew, do really intend to insult the average Chinese by saying that they can't handle the flood of "hits" that a search for "Jesus Christ" would generate, when the average American has no such problem? What do you think they are, little children who need to be spoon-fed? What an UTTERLY "liberal" notion.

Jeez.

I don't think Andrew meant that the Chinese should be "spoon-fed." But it fascinates me to watch a young liberal collegian encounter this and immediately mention that people should be given what's "appropriate." Call it a sort of Freudian Slip.

Google, here at least, does not limit results according to what people show interest in; rather it ranks them that way. So if the Chinese are not interested in Christianity, then the first results displayed would be for some non-religious uses of the word that they are interested in--say, "Young Men's Christian Association" (YMCA). But the rest of the hits should be there, if they are not censored.

I don't think Andrew meant that the Chinese should be "spoon-fed." But it fascinates me to watch a young liberal collegian encounter this and immediately mention that people should be given what's "appropriate." Call it a sort of Freudian Slip.

Google, here at least, does not limit results according to what people show interest in; rather it ranks them that way. So if the Chinese are not interested in Christianity, then the first results displayed would be for some non-religious uses of the word that they are interested in--say, "Young Men's Christian Association" (YMCA). But the rest of the hits should be there, if they are not censored.

Hale,
The idea of Google.cn creating what would be essentially a Chinese version of the web (http://CCC.google.cn or something) is more than a bit disturbing. My point is this: I want to see evidence that each Google locality does not turn up results based upon it’s locality. That is, does google.india (or whatever), Google.ru, google.uk etc turn up the same results as google.com, merely ranked according to national tastes? Or does it only index things each audience thinks is relevant?

Show me where, in this post, I used the word “appropriate”? ‘cause I’m not seeing it. Indeed what I said was that it would hardly be surprising that a country where Christianity is in the extreme minority would find pictures of Jesus to be rather irrelevant...

Andrew, I goofed. I remembered you writing "appropriate" in the first comment, but actually the word you used was "relevent."

It was me that made a Freudian Slip.

Andrew,

I don't doubt that you're right about how results get ranked. What bothers me is the paucity of the results returned. The Internet is a world-wide phenomenon-- the *quantity* of "hits" is (as you yourself noted) doesn't depend on the version of Google used, as long as the version is one used in a free country.

That google.cn returns so few results (the ranking of those hits is irrelevant) indicates to my suspicious mind that SOMEONE is filtering the responses.

And a larger point-- if France allows people to use google.com in preference to google.fr, why doesn't China allow people to use google.com in preference to google.cn?

I think arguments about "relevance" are a smokescreen for censorship-- it seems to me that the operators of google.cn don't trust the users of the service to determine relevance for themselves, hence my comment about spoon-feeding.

Methinks they (Google, at the behest of the Communist Chinese regime) are trying to hide something (like the truth, messy as it is) from the Chinese people.

As for Christianity, in places like Japan it's very much a minority faith simply because Buddhism and Shintoism are very deeply entrenched, and Christianity has been practiced freely only for the last 150 years, and was firmly suppressed for 250 years before that.

In Communist China, religion of all kinds is discouraged as a threat to the regime, and Christianity is on the march (as John notes) because the people there are HUNGRY for something to believe in, after 60 years of official atheism. And I suspect that today's young people in China really don't care about the "traumatic" circumstances under which Christianity came to China, whether those circumstances truly were traumatic or mere depicted as such by Communist revisionist historians determined to paint religion in a bad light generally.

What strikes me as more likely is that Google.cn is trying to find and index things that are relevant to its Chinese audience. And since China is a country who had a rather traumatic introduction to Christianity, perhaps the Chinese themselves aren’t saying that much about Christ...

IF you're referring to the taiping rebellion... that didn't have much to do with Christianity per se, but a locally created offshoot; it also wasn't the first introduction of Christianity to China, since in the first millenia there had been populations of Nestorian Christians in various parts of the North and West.

Now, show me evidence that Buddhism is being censored in some way, and perhaps you’ll have a case...

Now that in particular is one of the most astoundingly ignorant things I've heard in a long LONG while. Not only because it implies that Christianity "deserves" to be censored and Buddhism doesn't, but it also ignores the historical and present-day reality that Buddhism in China is more or less limited to those that teach government-approved catechisms. (Which is much the same status "official" Christianity has in China as well).

Imagine how you'd feel if George W. Bush insisted on the right to _fire_ your local Catholic priests, or episcopalian ministers, or unitarian whatevers, or Jewish rabbis and appoint only those who preached what _he'd_ approve of.

THAT's the way religion is regulated in China.

NOW does it look like tyrrany to you?

I’ve been running the Jesus Christ search on google.cn for a while. Once every few hours. I’ve noticed the number of hits is going up. A lot. Perhaps it took a while to populate the Google.cn database?

Phil Fraering,
Is China Fascist? Yes. Is this bad. Duh. Would I want to see the Chinese people rise up against their totalitarian overlords and replace them with a real, multi-party democracy? You betcha. Am I starting to sound like Rumsfield? Sure seems that way...

But you’re missing my point, I am not saying Christianity deserves to be censored (anyone who reads pretty much anything I’ve ever written on Free Speech will pick that up instantly). What I am saying is that I don’t think I see censorship in this case. I think I see apathy on the part of the Chinese...

(as of 12:57pm, GMT-8 Google.jp: Jesus Christ の検索結果 約 156,000 件中 1 - 20 件目 (0.15 秒 ).

Google.cn: 约有139,000项符合Jesus Christ的查询结果，以下是第1-20项。 （搜索用时 0.17 秒）)...