links for 2010-01-17

THEIR EDITORIAL: The most likely outcome is that Google loses access to an important market, Chinese customers lose access to its services, and the government loses face. Google's decision in 2006 that entering the mainland market was a net positive for information flows was well reasoned. The tragedy is that the Chinese government became so aggressive in its repression that this is no longer the case.

China still has a long way to go before it's considered rich. And some sympathetic analysts argue that it's not fair to hold China's civic development to American standards. The United States had China's present-day economic profile—per-capita GDP of about $5,000, 40 percent of the work force in agriculture, 30 years of industrialization and urbanization—in 1900, a time when there were no direct elections for Senate, women couldn't vote, and segregation reigned in the south.