Google and the Government of China: A Case Study in Cross-Cultural Negotiations

Running head: LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
Leadership and Management
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1LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT
Google and the Government of China: A Case Study in Cross-Cultural Negotiations
What were Google's interests and positions? What were its alternatives and how good
were they?
In China, Google had limited presence. The Chinese government a counterpart to
Google’s search engine known as Baidu.com. Due government interference, the search
results of Google were extremely slow and Google is unable to provide efficient and fast
service that they intend to provide (Ahammad et al., 2016). Along with that they also wanted
to uphold their organization principle of ‘don’t be evil’. In the negotiation, Google had both
financial and non-financial interest. They wanted to tap the vast internet user market of China
on which they had limited access to and to provide the Chinese users, uncensored information
from their server. Their position in the negotiation was quite questionable as one of the few
things that they had to offer to China was their efficient server system and technology and
employment. This too, was dependent on Dr. Lee and his impact. Google had two alternative
outcome expectations from the negotiation. They wanted the government’s approval on
building a Chinese domain so that Google becomes available to Chinese users. Alternatively,
if the government did not allow that, they wanted to acquire a Baidu’s share so that are able
to provide their service to China. The alternatives that they had decided were good but quite
uncertain as Chinese government takes their censorship and flow of information that
contradict their interest quite seriously (Rieder & Sire, 2014).
What were China's interests and positions? What were the government's alternatives
and how good were they?
The Chinese government had two interests in the negotiation as well. First of all,
Google had appointed Dr. Kai-fu Lee who was well respected in China and the Chinese