It seems impossible to find on Google but I know I remember reading that they refused to operate under Chinese law, so weren't allowed to operate there. IIRC something about them refusing to store Chinese data in China?
It seems impossible to find on Google but I know I remember reading that they refused to operate under Chinese law, so weren't allowed to operate there. IIRC something about them refusing to store Chinese data in China?
Google's official story is that they were struggling with Chinese censorship laws for their entire time operating there. This is during a time period where Google had significantly open internal communication, and was full of people who believed in open internet as a major political stance, so there was significant internal pressure to not follow any censorship laws.
In response to getting hacked by the Chinese military in 2010, Google stopped obeying any Chinese censorship laws, and slowly got itself more and more blocked on the Chinese internet.
However, all of this takes place against a backdrop of Google getting its ass kicked by Baidu, which came out two years earlier than Google, and of course had better Chinese language support the whole time.
That may have been the reason then, but now Chinese privacy laws are strict enough that Google's main revenue stream (selling user data) would be essentially non-existent.