This would put the ball in Beijing’s court. China would have to do its own filtering to and from Hong Kong. Google would no longer do their dirty work. They knew that China would respond in kind. Most likely, the Communist Party would kick Google out of the market entirely. No American company had ever publicly called out Beijing for a cyberattack, even as Chinese hackers were pillaging American intellectual property in what Keith Alexander, the NSA director at the time, later called “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
