"This is an important reminder that events do not progress in a straight line"

Yes, Google+ is the intermediate step in the all seeing "identity" service depicted in this story ;)

Or a reminder that sometimes symptoms are misidentified as causes.

(Which is to say: Doctorow seems to have seen being in China as a big step on the way to relaxing "Don't be evil". But perhaps Google was only in China because it had already relaxed on "Don't be evil". And thus staying in China, or even going there initially, was relatively irrelevant to its corporate trajectory.)