It's Rishi

Ask most people about Alibaba and you’ll likely be met with scratching heads. A lot of people have heard the name, but only a few folks seem to know that Alibaba is a Chinese company that offers a directory service for Chinese manufacturers and suppliers. I had watched some sort of documentary a few months back that played up the vastness of Alibaba’s directory and how through a couple clicks of your mouse, you too could can find a suitable Chinese supplier for just about any type of good you want to manufacture or sell.

Alibaba makes a lot of sense. I mean let’s face it. Doing business internationally is intimidating. Doing business in China is even more intimidating unless maybe if you’re Chinese and speak the language well. I certainly am not such a person so I know that connecting myself to the right Chinese supplier would be next to impossible without an agent to help me. From what I’ve been told, such agents can be quite expensive and because of biases (read: kickbacks), the agent may not even connect you with the optimal supplier for your needs.

Alibaba usurps the need for such an agent and provides someone like me direct access to the suppliers. It’s a simple concept that offers exciting opportunity for creating business relationships between foreign companies and China. Assuming Alibaba works as advertised, it’s no wonder that Yahoo! invested $1bn for a 40% chunk of the company. But, the question is, does it work? Is it really that easy for an average American businessman to locate and work with the right Chinese partner?

For one man’s experience, check out this post by Greg Runco. Greg designed a slipper and was looking for someone to manufacture it. He used Alibaba and describes his experience thus far with the supplier he chose. Greg also has several other interesting posts on his blog. I find his style sort of similar to mine and I enjoyed reading through his posts. Thanks for the introduction Greg!

So the big news of the day is that Google has agreed to censor its search results in China. Because Google had not previously complied with China’s policies, the Chinese government either blocked or severely crippled access to Google. China’s a huge, growing market and being shut out of that market was obviously not good for Google. Immediately after the announcement was made, tons of negative headlines both in the mainstream media and the blogosphere sprouted up. The announcement caught everyone by surprise since agreeing to censor its results is so seemingly un-Google like. It’s kinda hard to “do no evil” if you’re implicitly supporting the Chinese government violate the human rights of their citizens. Google’s counter argument is that their hope is to influence a loosening of Chinese policies over the long-term.

To be honest, while I was surprised by the announcement, I wasn’t planning on losing sleep over the matter. After all, what do I care, right? I’ve got the beautiful 1st Amendment by my side (although we do unfortunately have the FCC). Well…

Other search engines, including Y! and MSN, already censor results in China. Out of curiosity, I searched for ‘tiananmen square’ on both Yahoo! and Yahoo! China. The result was sickening.

‘tiananmen square’ search on Yahoo!
1,790,000 hits. Pages of links describing the 1989 protest/massacre.

‘tiananmen square’ search on Yahoo! China
4 hits. Some junk spam.

Unbelievable. I’m finding it difficult for me not to care. It seems like Google’s need to satisfy its shareholders is corrupting the company’s values again.

UPDATE:

Earlier when I was writing this post, it seemed like Google China had not yet enabled censoring. Although, I just checked again and it looks like in fact it is now.

‘tiananmen square’ search on Google
1,810,000 hits. Pages of links describing the 1989 protest/massacre.

‘tiananmen square’ search on Google China
10 hits. Chinese tourist guides.

I can’t read Chinese but it does look like Google China is in fact printing an alert indicating to the user that the results have been censored.