Wasn’t that a response of one of their Chinese offices being hacked with the intention of corporate espionage?
As far as I’m aware, from a privacy perspective, Google never had moral problems doing business in China. They’re just using it as a convenient excuse that makes them look good.
>These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.
In other words, government censorship and attempts by the government to undermine user privacy were ultimately what led to the move out of China. The straw does appear to have been the hack, but the ultimate goal of the hack appeared to be to steal user data.
>Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
That's exactly what Google did:
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...