You've never been to China, have you?

Access to gmail is spotty and unreliable, like most other google services. Android phones connect to Chinese android market and most have alternative chinese only app markets. If google where to stop access to android market, people would get pissed, but switch app-provider.

For the rest, these are barely used services. I don't even think hangouts are accessible, since it's a part of Google+, which is blocked. Maps? Year, it's nice, but so is Baidu maps. Picasa? Which economy is impacted by picasa?

> China's weakness is they cannot censor where it crimps the economy too much. It's brilliant.

While this is true, google is not one of them.

I've been going to China since 1985 (28 years), speak Chinese and Japanese, and read the newspapers fluently in both.

How about Amazon?

To be fair, a number of those are regularly and/or completely blocked in China, e.g. Google Drive[1] and encrypted.google.com[2] completely (if I'm reading those right) and gmail[3] often enough to be notable.

[1] https://zh.greatfire.org/https/drive.google.com

[2] https://zh.greatfire.org/encrypted.google.com

[3] https://zh.greatfire.org/https/mail.google.com

Also, Android in China is completely degoogleified. No Google accounts, no Play, no GMail...

Surely that's a good thing?!

The translation of your link for Gmail says Gmail is (only) 9% blocked in China.

If Gmail didn't work 9% of the time, nobody would use it.

right, which is why I said "often enough to be notable". Nearly 1 out of 10 visits blocked would certainly make use of it difficult. However, almost all of the samples for gmail are colored orange, but google translate doesn't do a great job of translating the legend ("矛盾" -> "Contradiction"?), or at least I'm not sure what that means.

--Gmail, Android, Chrome, Picasa, Google Drive, Docs, Translate, Maps, Scholar, Books, Earth, AppEngine, Research, Hangouts. Too many Chinese rely on these financially, and in their jobs-- google docs, google drive, google videos are already blocked in China, google images is almost useless, as it blocks in the second search, then you have to restart the browser to search another keyword for images ( count until 10 before restart the browser ) and even google search is almost useless in most of China, as it takes too long to return the results (except for the big cities, where it works ok) , same for Gmail, it takes 5 minutes to open, and often never opens, the progress bar just stops in the middle.Again, this is not for big cities, but try to open Gmail out of the urban area of big cities and wait. Lan-houses(cyber cafes) dont open Gmail even in big cities. The impact on economy for completely blocking google will be almost zero. I live in China for 10 years, right now using a ssh to open gmail.