So what this means is that all searches to Baidu are most likely government monitored. I remember watching a Frontline documentary about China in the 2000s. It profiled one guy who kept on moving to more egregiously luxurious apartments, as his government contracts grew (he ran an advertising agency and as the Frontline series had concluded he had landed a major contract for Beijing 2008 and was moving into the penth…
Where did you read that?
> The secret to Baidu's success -- and Google's failure -- is largely positioning. First, Baidu has managed to win Beijing's favor, a trump card in this command economy. The government controls the Internet and appreciates loyal partners. Baidu understands that it operates under the good graces of the Chinese Communist Party, and continues to show it. As Robin Li, the company's chief executive, said in an interview with the Guardian, "As a locally operated company we need to obey the Chinese law. If the law determines that certain information is illegal, we need to remove it from our index."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/29/where_googl...
> Privacy and Security. Google is committed to protecting consumer privacy and confidentiality. Prior to the launch of Google.cn, Google conducted intensive reviews of each of our services to assess the implications of offering it directly in China. We are always conscious of the fact that data may be subject to the jurisdiction of the country where it is physically stored. With that in mind, we concluded that, at least initially, only a handful of search engine services would be hosted in China.
We will not store data somewhere unless we are confident that we can meet our expectations for the privacy and security of users’ sensitive information. As a practical matter, meeting this user interest means that we have no plans to host Gmail, Blogger, and a range of other such services in China.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony-internet-in...