Those are two very bold claims: that Google pulled out of China for purely ideological reasons, and that the Chinese tech industry would have otherwise failed if they had stayed. We are dealing with hypotheticals here, so it's not like we can back up our propositions with actual evidence. But both ideas just seem deeply unlikely based on what we know of both Google and Chinese tech.
not sure why this is downvoted. Chinese companies can definitely make their own search engine. And in fact search engines are not so big in china anyway; everything is an app, and questions are answered on Zhihu. Google's time in China was up anyway and they knew it. It was good PR for them to leave with a bang. Does anyone really thing the CCP would allow Google to collect data on every Chinese person as they do in the US? And without data collection ads become much less profitable (see: facebook). This would also set a precedent of barring Google from data collection which would spread elsewhere. Now its just seen as a domestic Chinese thing only.
