http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

What do you think?

why should they willingly shut down a branch of their business when they loose money by doing so? there has to be something else behind it; either they already know that their plea to the chinese government will be successful or this is some kind of economic hitman thing ("We want to make clear that this move was driven by our executives in the United States").

Could be pure aesthetics, but indeed it could imply more.

Just to make it clear: It seems to be pretty sure that google leaves china ( http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aU43JmiuDJaQ and many other sources - see Google News: http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&...google%2Bchina )

Certainly the current-loss is not extremly high (Probably the exchange in China is about 1-5% of Googles total exchange) - nevertheless it seems to be a (odd?) human gesture.

Google has a "Do no harm" policy. They see censorship as a form of evil.

They are also tired of hacking attempts that they believe are coming from the Chinese government itself.

This move makes sense to Google.

It's called "Don't be evil..."
This here is pretty much my opinion:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/17/the-price-of-google-in-china/

Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO convinced the founders Page and Brin to accept the cencorship in China for business reasons, although they were against it. Seems they finally got their will...