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"Google has vision but its execution in China wasn't strong. They don't get the nitty-gritty nuances and are not close enough to the market," said Quinn Taw, a Beijing-based venture partner at Mustang Ventures who has held senior positions at Mindshare and Zenith Media in China.

Until recently, for instance, Google.cn had the same clean, sleek look of Google.com, even though Chinese web surfers, particularly in the early days, preferred clicking on popular search topics rather than typing in search characters. Baidu's site reflected that preference from the start.

"With its massively popular Tieba forums, a question-and-answer service and a wiki, Baidu leveraged Chinese netizens' natural propensity to share and create content and seamlessly integrated it in to the overall search experience way before Google's attempts," said Sam Flemming, founder and chairman of CIC, an internet research and consulting firm in Shanghai.

tionalism and corruption. When Baidu issued its IPO in late 2005, about one-third of Baidu's users were music fans using the site's online music file-sharing service, which operated much like Napster. Baidu didn't earn revenue from the music downloads, but music attracted tens of millions of Chinese to its site and helped make it the No. 1 search engine player. As an American company bound by U.S. laws protecting intellectual property, this growth tactic was not open to Google. Music companies, of course, hate Baidu's music-sharing site. The major labels such as EMI, Warner Music Group and Vivendi's Universal Music have tried suing local sites that allowed illegal downloading, including Baidu, with minimal success in court and little support from Chinese consumers.

Unlike Baidu, Google made another mistake in refusing to offer rebates for volume media buys, a common, if not always legal, practice in China's media industry. (

Media buyers "couldn't give Google money if they wanted to," Mr. Taw said. "Their sales guys were very arrogant, superior and hard to get hold of. They went out of their way to be jerks."

Editors of the World Journal said they were happy to see Google defend the freedom of online information without censorship, describing it as “an act of courage.” A popular column in World Journal contends that it is time for the Chinese government to change in order to develop into a truly strong country. “A real strong country is not just strong economically,” the column argues. “It also needs development in people’s values, in order to build a healthy and principled system, and abolish the current zero-tolerance policy on dissident expression.”

An editorial written by Feng Lei of Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily doubts if Beijing is willing to let go of Google. “A company like Google not only serves as a technology leader in China’s domestic market, but also, by virtue of its presence, has a ‘catfish effect’ [raising overall performance in the industry]. Without this presence and effect, there will be a definite impact on the development of the industry domestically.”

A news analysis in China Times describes the announcement as a tactic for Google to gain more freedom in China.

The most popular blogger in China, Han Han, also expressed his support for Google. He wrote on his blog, “I understand Google’s decision, whether it is for real or not. What I don’t understand is that some Web sites conducted surveys saying that 70 percent of Internet users do not support Google’s request that the Chinese government stop its censorship. While looking at these survey results on the government Web site, you often find yourself on the opposite side,” adding that these Web sites should be the ones to be censored.

A blog on Baidu.com, Google’s biggest competitor in China, said, “The tone of the top Google legal advisor disgusts me. He could have said that they are withdrawing for economic reasons, plain and simple. Instead, they have to make themselves look good by saying that Google was attacked by Chinese people, that Gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents were attacked, and so on in order to explain why they are withdrawing from China. This type of tone is an insult to the intelligence of ordinary Chinese citizens.”

The reason Google is having a hard time in China, she argued, is that there is a mismatch between American ideology and Chinese management style. “In the Chinese market, Google has no intention of adjusting itself to adapt to the Chinese situation, but works according to its own ideology,” she writes. “That’s why, under media exposure during the anti-pornography campaign, Google could barely handle the situation and had to change its leadership in China.”