FWIW, Google said they pulled out of China for principled reasons but they did it practically for self-preservation. Google got hacked by inside actors planted

FWIW, Google said they pulled out of China for principled reasons but they did it practically for self-preservation. Google got hacked by inside actors planted in their physical offices by the Chinese government. It's one of the very few times that Gmail's security was compromised. At the time, Google did not have the security countermeasures in place to protect against such an attack so they responded by severing the physical ties so such an attack could not be repeated. Once the BeyondCorp initiative had completed and they had the technology necessary to firewall pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights from other pieces of their infrastructure where users had admin rights, they reopened business in China because the risk model had changed.