The New York Times actually ran the story about Google ending its participation in Chinese Internet censorship as its lead story on Wednesday morning, even ahead of its story on the Haitian earthquake. (The Washington Post ran it second, after the earthquake.) Within a short time of the story breaking on newspaper Web sites Tuesday evening, my Chinese teacher in Boston told me she had gotten a message from a friend in China about a "rumor" about Google's threat to leave China. By Wednesday morning U.S. time, according to my Chinese teacher, half the status updates she saw on Ren Ren, the country's Chinese-language Facebook knockoff, involved the Google story. None of them, she said, defended the Chinese government; all sided with Google and criticized Chinese net censorship.
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