The battle between search giant Google and the Chinese government rumbles on with Reuters reporting that the site is now almost completely blocked in China with only a small handful of people able to access it. Worse, Google’s share price has dropped 1.4% on the news so far which goes to demonstrate the importance that shareholders place on success in the world’s largest and fastest growing economy for existing multinationals.  Conversely China’s largest search engine, which already has a huge lead in the country, saw its share price rise by 3.5% According to the Google China service page , services such as web search suggest, YouTube, Blogger and Picassa are completely unavailable but this seems to be an improvement on an earlier report by NeoWin that found more Google services were offline. Google recently returned to China after pulling out in a row with the communist government there who had allegedly hacked into the GMail accounts of Chinese dissidents.  A tit-for-tat spat then played out with China blocking access to Google’s Chinese website and Google then redirecting all traffic to its Hong Kong site instead.  Hong Kong is a former British colony that was handed back to China in 2000, but not before it had become a huge centre for democracy and commerce that even China knew they’d never enforce order there in the way they do on the Chinese mainland

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