I would not participate in the project, but isn’t it fairly simple to build a censored search engine while punting all moral responsibility for that censorship

I would not participate in the project, but isn’t it fairly simple to build a censored search engine while punting all moral responsibility for that censorship to the Chinese Government? Simply build your index by crawling from machines inside the great firewall. Whatever gets indexed gets indexed; that’s up to the Great Firewall overlords. Hiding search metadata from the CCP is another thing entirely I suppose, but do-able if allowed by the regime (simply don’t log anything).