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No. They’re unavailable because they refused to go back into the market after China got caught using espionage. Were it not for that, it’s very possible Google would have caved; we don’t know how that would have fallen. It’s convenient they didn’t have to answer that, but not because they didn’t cave.

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It’s not true though. They were under tremendous pressure to adapt their product and change it for the ccp (with censorship for example). They were constantly resisting by introducing workarounds. Until the espionnage thing when they said "fuck it, we’re done". I remember very well: I was living in China at the time.

Absence of evidence doesn't seem as definitive as you're making it here, but it's worth noting that we have two counterfactuals we can use as a prior: Bing still works in China and Yahoo only pulled out last summer, in spite of public espionage and hacking incidents.

> Bing still works in China

If by ‘works’ you mean it allows searches that China finds acceptable.

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