It has been a frustrating past year in China without direct access to Google  Photos and Youtube, with broken search-result links, disruptions in service, and the corruption of Google Docs, making the application suite all but unusable at times. And then they went and hacked Google customer  accounts.

I hadn’t expected to see the powers that be succumbing so soon to hubris on such a bald-facedly international scale. Perhaps with their victory a year ago in cowing Microsoft into submission, they calculated they could poke Google in the eye without Google so much as blinking. Recall that in the Fall of 2008 Microsoft came very close to remotely shutting down every version in China of its operating system that was illegally installed; that likely meant more than eighty percent of all the computers in China.

Now, China is dealing with a company with (professed) scruples: Google doesn’t like any of its customer accounts, it says, hacked. And indications are strong that the force and sophistication of the hack point at China’s national security apparatus. Like so many other aspects of its tentative entry into the larger world, China has clodded onstage like a hick with great muddy boots and passed gas into the microphone. No ballerina, is China, when it comes to delicate maneuvering in global affairs.

But then, the powers that be have never had to finesse their way domestically. They like it that way. Google’s response to the hack, it’s threat to pull out of the market, that it does indeed pull out of the Chinese-language market -all fit well in the central authority’s world view, which does not include sharing China with powerful, globe-straddling multi-nationals. This is guojinmintui - literally, “the state advances as the private sector recedes” – with international characteristics: the leadership is feeling out how much of the world it can co-opt before it completely closes in upon itself: culturally, with trade, on the internet. Satisfied with itself.

Google: Croesus and Solon.