Google may be mighty. But China is mightier still. To establish itself in the growing Chinese market, Google admitted Wednesday it had agreed to take on the onus of self-censorship in order to create a direct presence as google.cn. Until now, Chinese users of the search engine had to get to it by way of the United States and through a gauntlet of Chinese Internet police. But now they will be able to open Google's pages from home, and they will no longer see any evidence of censorship. It will be censorship without any black ink, search results on a clean looking page. Plug in a hot-button topic like "Falun Gong," and you won't get the same results you would find on Google.cn's American counterpart.

However, the gain of the Chinese government will be the sleepless nights of Google, according to the German press. After all, Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, with their motto "Don't be evil," wanted not just might, they also wanted to be right. "While the removal of search results is not compatible with the goals of Google, it is even less compatible to provide no information," the company's flacks
said in China this week, seeking to justify the decision. What they didn't say, however, is that 110 Million Chinese internet users already have access to similarly censored versions of the MSN and Yahoo search engines. Still, the company hopes "with its culture of innovation to make an important contribution to the development of China."

For the German press, this is little more than Orwellian "newspeak." the Financial Times Deutschland refers to Google.cn as "Orwell's Search Engine." In Chinese, "Kou tou" describes an act of deep respect bowing the head in reverence to touch the ground. In western usage, however, kowtow connotes scraping servility. German newspapers have taken the events in Peking as Google's betrayal of western values.

SPIEGEL ONLINE criticizes Google's pretensions to moral superiority. In contrast to Google, which has been wishy washy and has had to hunt for excuses, the editorial notes that Yahoo was far more transparent and forthcoming about the fact that its Chinese users are given a censored site. Yahoo, knew it would be "shown the door" by Beijing authorities -- and while its activities may be "immoral," at least it has been upfront and more honests. The Spiegel editorial rejects Google claims that the restrictions on key ideas like "democracy" and "human rights" being accepted in China are in principle no different from restrictions in western countries on child pornography or neo-Nazi sites. "Google China will offer neither blogs, e-mail services, forums or similar things," it continues. "Even if executives at Google headquarters manage to convince themselves that they aren't evil, with their kowtow to the Chinese power holders they have lost much of the good will with which this search engine has become, within the space of a few years, the top brand of the web."

Switzerland's Neue Züricher Zeitung sees a similar betrayal. "That Google voluntarily and out of purely commercial interest has submitted itself to the political decree of Beijing damages more than just the company. It is also a major set-back for all those who thought that the economic and technological modernization of China must inevitably lead to political opening."

The left-liberal Frankfurter Rundschau's take is sarcastic. "It is but a small step for Google, but a giant step for the free West," the paper writies. "It's all a question of perspective on the moon as on Earth." The Rundschau describes search engines as the pathway to the "most radically free part of the world, the Internet. Here there is everything, filth next to beauty, crime next to aid, and above all: information, information, information. " The editorial concludes with this note to Brin and Page: "Hopefully it is worth the price. You just sold our fundamental values."

The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung brings a report by Georg Blume, its longtime China correspondent. The judgment is somewhat less categorical, emphasizing that many of the fields Google will be censoring were always banned in China. But "nonetheless the cooperation of the Internet multinationals with the Chinese Internet police means that the security of dissidents and critics and of the diversity of opinion in China will be further endangered." The internet enterprises have obliged themselves to help with police investigations. At the end of December Microsoft closed the popular site of the Chinese journalist Michael Anti, even though Anti was using a Microsoft server in the United States. "Microsoft thus acted on behest of Beijing, whose police wanted to stop Anti's critical coverage of a journalists' strike," Blume adds. "In that sense Microsoft let Chinese law apply even in America." Still, the dispatch ends with some slight optimism. It notes that there is already likely a considerable amount of content on Google.cn that will bring discomfort to Beijing's Communist Party leaders. With explosive growth in the number of Internet pages in China, it will be extremely challenging for the Communist government and Google to keep up with all that would be deemed censorable.

-- Anjana Shrivastava
1 p.m. CET

Pope Benedict XVI's Love Fest

Pope Benedict's first encyclical  is being viewed in Germany as evidence of the Catholic Church's heightened concern over the state of worldly affairs from the bedrooms to the boardrooms to the battlefields. A high-ranking official from the Vatican, Cardinal Renato Martino, concurs when he describes the text as a "clear policy program" in which "love and charity" must be seen as the answer to many modern dilemmas. There has been some surprise given that, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the new pope was the Vatican's "Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" for 24 years, and as such, in charge of the exact enforcement of orthodoxy.

In these times of sectarian violence and crusading notions of religion, the Church demonstratively describes religion as human love and shared humanity. "Love is free; it is not practiced as a way of achieving other ends," states Benedict. In this view the Church, shepherd to 1.1 billion members, must be seen equally an instrument of this love, channeling marital love as a path to god, or social love to social service. In the letter entitled "Deus Caritas Est" or "God is Love," even God becomes less an end in himself but rather a reflection of human love.

The conservative Die Welt is confident the pope will find a wide and perhaps unexpected audience. "This encyclical will disappoint all who had been looking forward to being disappointed," it writes in an editorial. "Benedict XVI didn't present himself as a reactionary, which many want to see in him, nor did he accommodate by coming up with attacks against feminists, nor was his pedagogical intent in writing about 'God is love' to go on a campaign against condoms." Indeed, Die Welt finds broad appeal in the pope's message. "The German Pope has written a measured text which gives Catholics a useful orientation and which could find approval in many passages from Protestants and atheists alike," it concludes.

But not everyone is going to like it. "There is nothing more beautiful or grander than love," writes the leftist Die Tageszeitung. "But what love is and how one lives it, of this the pope knows little, even if he pretends to be knowledgeable. He offers a single, discredited path to love (marital union) and declares everything else as inferior. Possibly this is part of his job as CEO of the Catholic Church, but it isn't helpful." Beacons are necessary," the editorial concludes, "but the Pope is nothing more than a pirate who lures travelers into an ambush and, in the end, merely robs them."

The left-of-center Süddeutsche Zeitung offers an opposite take, arguing that the encyclical encourages engagement to help the poor and downtrodden. "The Pope shows the contours of a 'Church for Others,' as the Protestant marytr Dietrich Bonhoeffer once described it," the paper writes. "A Church which neither declaims easy recipes for global justice in its missionary fervor, nor becomes disheartened or cynical in the face of the world's misery. A church which always raises its voice when anybody promises a heaven on earth, paradises of any kind whether of the socialist or global capitalist variety." In that sense, the paper writes, the pope has come to an important realization: "The Church and its followers will be measured based upon the amount of love they show the world."

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes that the Pope's message of love is designed to counter the bad image of religion prevalent in recent years, "as a fundamentalist threat to peace, a spiritual force which is capable of unleashing terrorist energies." The paper's lead article opines that Europeans, far from shunning religion in the future, will soon give religion a much greater role in public life, as Americans have already done. In this regard the FAZ emphasizes that the Pope refers specifically to a "Christian God."  "God himself gave the people of Judeo-Christian tradition the task of bearing witness to his loving deeds in and with humanity. Of course that sounds very pious. But it looks certain that the public discourse of nations with Christian traditions are becoming more religious -- in the United States this is fully under way -- if only for the reason that ever more of our contemporaries understand what a wealth of human and historical wisdom was lost when religion became outmoded." Thus, the FAZ gave the Pope's encyclical partisan tones, while the other papers were even surprised by the universality of the message.