Google is still censoring search content for some of its customers in China, a company spokeswoman said yesterday, in a decision that underscores the Internet giant’s delicate effort to hold on to its Chinese businesses days after moving its search engine offshore.
The decision to provide censored searches was made to honor contracts with current business partners and Google will continue to meet those commitments, said Jessica Powell, the firm’s Tokyo-based spokeswoman.
She said that all censoring done by Google in China would be phased out over a time period she would not specify.
“If there are cases where we were providing a censored search and were contractually required to provide censored search, then we will honor those requirements,” Powell said.
In a separate e-mail she said that over time Google would “not be offering syndicated censored search to any partners in China.”
She declined to name the customers, but Li Zhi, an analyst for Analysys International, a Beijing research firm, said Google was likely referring to search services on sites such as Sina, China’s most popular portal, and Tianya.com, a popular forum site.
Tianya.cn announced late yesterday that it would take over operation of two services developed and formerly operated with Google.
It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted Tianya.cn’s decision to take over the two sites.
One analyst said the portal may have come under pressure to distance itself from Google or perhaps it was a sign that Google itself had decided to break more of its ties to China.
Google’s search services remained erratic across Beijing yesterday, frustrating users unsure about the future of its other services — from maps to music.
Many of Google’s often well-educated, professional fan-base in China, who use its software for both work and play, said they were already suffering some fallout yesterday with erratic service.
Several of Google’s international search sites were failing to open, and when they could be accessed some users found that all searches, including for non-sensitive terms like “hello,” were returning blank pages or error messages.
Businesses, university students and people in private homes reported intermittent problems on the main Google.com site, the Google.co.uk site and Google.ca.
“Google.com.hk is not currently being blocked, although it seems that some sensitive terms are. However, if you search for a sensitive term and trigger a government blockage, that may affect subsequent searches ... for a short period,” Google said.
The People’s Daily yesterday accused the company of colluding with US spies, in China’s latest blast at the company.
“Google is not a virgin when it comes to values. Its cooperation and collusion with the US intelligence and security agencies is well-known,” a front-page commentary in the overseas edition of the paper said.
“All this makes one wonder. Thinking about the United States’ big efforts in recent years to engage in Internet war, perhaps this could be an exploratory pre-dawn battle,” it said.
Also See: Google criticizes Canberra
Also See: Remaining Google units exposed to whims of an angry Beijing
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has