Delicious, extra butter please
"Liu will apparently be replaced by Scott Beaumont, who currently works on European partnerships for the firm and ostensibly has no China experience."
Popcorn anyone?
Google's head of Greater China, John Liu, will step down after four torrid years in the role that saw the firm’s search business rendered all but irrelevant in the Middle Kingdom. Liu arrived at Google around six years ago as head of sales before stepping into the shoes of founding president Kai-Fu Lee in 2009. A Google …
I don't think it matters who is in charge, the CCP decide whether you succeed in business over there, and over the past few years have been pretty aggressively pushing domestic services over foreign ones, no matter how inferior they are.
At best they'll limp along with a tiny market share, at worst they'll be banned a la Facebook.
Maybe the WTO spotted in this instance that it was really about competition, and Google using "hacking by China" as an excuse to pull out rather than state the stock-price-affecting "we can't compete because the locals don't like us".
Given that Snowden showed that it was more the US hacking Chinese targets than the other way around, you should ask questions about Google inviting the NSA for help then - to me, that was the most serious hint yet that their story was not adding up and that there was a more than casual relationship between the NSA and Google.