Google’s motto is, “Don’t Be Evil.” In a New York Times interview with the company’s head of operations in China, Kai-Fu Lee championed the easy access to information that Google provides as a panacea for China’s struggling rural class.

The sheer scale of these utopian ethics is admirable, and when a company has amassed as much wealth and power as Google has, maybe it takes this sort of idealism to keep it grounded. Nevertheless, Google has its share of skeptics, among them the Chinese government and with it the titular influence in one of the most vibrant economies in the world.

This March Google stopped censoring search results on its China search engine Google.cn in an intentional breach of censorship laws passed by the People’s Republic of China. Access to the website was immediately blocked by the Chinese Government. However, Google has since been redirecting users looking to access Google.cn to its Hong Kong website. Hong Kong is an autonomous region in China with regard to economic and political administration and, for the moment, is supportive of Google’s ideals. Of course, the Chinese government is furious with Google and has already begun attempts to block the Hong Kong site as well.

American intuitions regarding free speech and world trade, for better or for worse, simply do not concatenate with those of the Chinese. Where internet users in the U.S. appreciate Google’s capacity to know practically everything about anything, the government in Beijing is reluctant to disrupt a tenuous harmony it has set up for itself. If the communist regime stops censoring search results and opens up a free flow of information, it will have to deal with democratic pressures. On the other hand, China will seemingly struggle to progress as a technologically advanced country if they do not stop restricting a free flow of information.

However, there is another level of nuance to the issue. China is a big boy in the world; it features one of the only growing economies and has a positive outlook on its own proclivities. The difficulties China is having with Google can easily be disseminated as simply stalwart business and, after all, Chinese perspective on humanist issues like free speech is hardly on the same playing field as their attitude toward nuclear proliferation.

Richard Navarro, an Information Systems professor at UM-St. Louis who spent a semester last year teaching at a Huazhong University in central China last year, emphasized the clash of business egos occurring between foreign companies and Chinese ones.

“The fact is, China is flexing its muscles and asserting the fact that it is an independent sovereign state and it is big enough to choose how to do business. We, the benevolent big United States of America, have taken the role for many years that the way we choose to do business is the way our trading partners ought to do business. China is starting to say ‘well, no,’” Navarro said.

But surely something as intuitive and effective as Google’s search engine can’t be blocked for long?

“Well you have to ask yourself how long will China find it in their best interest to be isolated, because there is a sense of isolation. Changes in economy happen relatively slowly, changes in culture happen even more slowly.”

Google’s move to stop censoring in China is certainly not evil from a social standpoint, but the jury is still out on whether it’s good, particularly in Beijing and particularly as a business maneuver. Google is losing its share in the vast Chinese economy while endangering its Chinese employees’ jobs, and as a result opening the market up further for Chinese state-approved companies.