Reevaluating China’s promise

Google’s frustration with doing business in China, which it detailed in an extensive statement on its corporate blog Tuesday night, included references not only to censorship, but also to cyber assaults on the e-mail accounts of human rights activists.

But if other companies are encouraged to reevaluate the value of their China operations, as Google says it will, that would mean a reversal of strategies that have been mostly focused on growth.

EMC, for example, said in 2007 it would be investing $1 billion in China over the next five years, and opening a second research and development center in Beijing. In 2008, it started a research collaboration with elite Chinese universities.

Yesterday, in response to the Google statement, the storage firm issued a terse release on its Chinese operations.

“At this time, we’ve seen no evidence suggesting that EMC has experienced attacks similar to those described by Google,’’ the statement said. “We continue to protect our operations and intellectual property in a consistent fashion around the world, and are diligent with regular and rigorous security reviews.’’

The Google announcement should be a wake-up call to US companies expanding in China, said Alan Tonelson, a research fellow at the United States Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation, a manufacturing trade group in Washington, D.C.

“The Google statement should cause any company that’s doing business in China to ask itself if its investment is really working out, or if it’s a victim of hype about the Chinese market,’’ Tonelson said. “These companies should also be asking themselves if they feel that their intellectual property is safe in China, and if their products are being used to track dissidents and human rights activists.’’

Last fall, Dunkin’ Brands proudly stated it had recently opened its first two Dunkin’ Donuts shops in Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong Province, and planned to open at least 148 more over the next 10 years. The company said it had secured agreements to open a total of 480 shops in mainland China over the next 10 years, and expected to sign additional commitments for expansion in other regions of China in the near future.

Yesterday a spokesman for Dunkin’ Brands said the company’s international team was in Indonesia, where it was the middle of the night, and were unavailable to comment on Google’s actions.

In August, Evergreen Solar participated in a ceremonial groundbreaking in Wuhan, China, celebrating a factory it was building in partnership with a Chinese company. Evergreen has since said it would shift a portion of the manufacturing it now does in Massachusetts to the new plant.

Yesterday, Evergreen did not respond to a request for a comment about its continued investment in China.

Other Boston-area companies with operations in China include networking company 3Com Corp., recently purchased by computer maker Hewlett-Packard Co.; Internet infrastructure company Akamai Technologies Inc., which has a Beijing office; insurer Liberty Mutual Group Inc.; and the Kraft Group, the owners of football’s New England Patriots, whose holdings include International Forest Products Inc., a big exporter of paper products to China.

Karsten Weide, who follows Google and other global companies as the program director for digital media and entertainment at IDC, a market intelligence firm based in Framingham, said he did not believe the Google statement will cause such companies to radically alter their China strategies.

“I don’t think it will make much of a ripple,’’ he said. “The Chinese market is just too good an opportunity. Most companies cannot afford to ignore the Chinese market.’’

Weide added his belief that Google was motivated to make its statement partly because the company “just found it very hard to compete with Baidu,’’ the government-supported search engine that is dominant in China. According to Internet measurement firm ComScore, Google has 14.1 percent of the Chinese search market; Baidu has 62.2 percent.

“When a commercial enterprise says they are doing something for moral reasons, it makes me suspicious,’’ Weide said.

Weide said that as recently as December, Microsoft said it was increasing its investment in China, with a particular focus on Bing, its search engine.

Yasheng Huang, a professor of international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, heard the news about Google’s threat while traveling in China. Reached by e-mail, he said his concern was not for Google, or other US companies with investments in China, but for China itself.

“I think that this is a highly significant development,’’ he wrote. “Google is one of the most admired technology companies in the world, and indeed, in China.’’

Huang said Google’s statement “signals in very concrete terms the vast gulf between China’s current environment and the environment that has created the kind of technological miracles such as Google.’’

Noting that China has its own technology ambitions, Huang said its success so far has been mainly as a manufacturer, and mostly of low-tech products.

“For the country to move to the next level and for the country to make true technological breakthroughs as Google has done in this country,’’ he said, “it has to revamp its system in some fundamental ways.’’

D.C. Denison can be reached at denison@globe.com.