It's not Google that's leaving China, it's China that's leaving the world

There's something really dear to Google at stake that it just isn't worth risking, given the unfavorable status quo, with their continued presence in China. Even after reading the lengthy blog post by Drummond in Google vs China I kept on wondering: why give up on such an important market like China? Many of the news outlets I frequent didn't quite give me the "aha" moment I sought.

Since we are in the participation age as Jonathan Schwartz likes to call it, I turned to comments for answers and managed to pick up some interesting bits as to why Google is making such a "bold" move.

I feel like everyone is talking around, but not addressing the likelihood that google.cn employees were involved with the govt/hacking. Google had to send their employees home to audit and secure their internal network and systems because that is by far the most vulnerable. --Mr.Recycle

2) google.cn is a like trojan horse into google’s secuity and IP. Technology is probably being smuggled over to baidu. If google shuts off that tap, they could potentially reenter the market later with a more evolved search engine and dominate. --Rdl

At least one thing is clear, a sudden realization of doing evil and then standing up to defend free speech is certainly not the real reason to quit censorship of search results after doing it for about four years in China.