Google’s burning Chinese bridges

Five days ago, I reported that Google was (finally!) getting some cojones dealing with China.

Now, I’m very, very happy to say that the Googlies have stopped dancing with the devil. They’re re-directing the google.cn address – that’s the Google address used inside China – to google.com.hk. That’s the Hong Kong version of the Google search engine.

You can see for yourself. Go ahead and type google.cn into your favorite web browser.

At this point, the Chinese government authorities are not blocking access to google.com.hk. So folks inside China who thought they were going to the censored google.cn are being automatically routed to an uncensored version of Google, in various Chinese languages.

The New York Times has a good overview.

UPDATE: Looks like the PRC authorities have started filtering search results from the Hong Kong site. Washington Post article here. This is getting more interesting by the minute.