The Google story in China now has a “Deep Throat” insider leaking information on a Chinese review site.
An anonymous poster on the Douban social media review site alleged on Friday 15 January that Google is shutting down in China to block access to source code by spies from the Chinese Community Party.
“The code theft this time caused Google to face a total collapse crisis,” the post reads. “To put it bluntly, the survival of the entire company would be threatened if they stayed in China.”
The post, no longer available on Douban, was translated into English on the EastSouthWestNorth bridge blog. The post says a spy was planted inside Google’s Shanghai office, and already had provided some source code to the party.
To protect the code, the post alleges, Google froze out Chinese engineers from servers hosting their work and assigned USA-based programmers to assess damage and rewrite the code.
Created for an educated Chinese audience, Douban publishes reviews of books, music and films. It’s like Digg meets The New Yorker. We’ll see how the tip plays out next week.
