Google, the internet search engine whose use is so globally endemic that it has become a verb, emerged yesterday into the bright light of political reality in China.
For all the talk in recent years about economic reforms, booming businesses and city skylines to mirror Manhattan's, the world's most populous nation remains a determined dictatorship with scant regard for the civil and human rights of its citizens.
China is endlessly fascinating for sure: within the space of less than 100 years, it has leapt from being a feudal society to a semi-industrialised one based on communist-inspired command economy principles. Today, a further transforming lurch has ushered in an era of almost untramelled laissez-faire capitalism in which the laws of the market are king.
But economic freedom has not been accompanied by freedom in other spheres. There is no right of free association, no right of free speech - no right, in other words, to proselytise an alternative political vision to that offered by the ruling Communist Party and its enforcing security apparatus. The message is simple: make all the money you want but do not dare to seek political pluralism. To many observers in the West, it seems an odd brew, filled with stresses and contradictions.
And now Google, a phenomenon of the 21st century and essentially Western liberal values, along with the Mac and iPod and other precocious offspring of the internet, has found it necessary to swallow some of its principles in order to grow. Google will self-censor searches in its Chinese service, denying access to information about democracy, Tiananmen Square, Tibet and Falun Gong, and anything else the authorities deem threatening.
The people behind Google, Americans Larry Page and Sergey Brin, always held themselves out as more than mere widget-makers. Theirs was a business with a mission to "organise the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible". The company's rather post-hippy motto is that it should "do no evil".
But like 19th century European diplomats at the emperor's court, in order to gain access to the world's largest emerging market Google has felt obliged to kowtow to the current emperors in Beijing. Some of Google's idealistic gloss has been dulled as a result but, in reality, it had little choice. The best that can be hoped is that access to information via Google, however restricted, will help to play some role in bringing greater freedom to people in China. Just not as large a role as might have been. But even now, perhaps in a shed in Shanghai, an 11-year-old is writing the software that will allow the Chinese to subvert the restrictions...