Former Google China President Weighs In on What It Takes to Succeed In the Country

Kai-Fu Lee, former Google China President, left the company about a year ago to focus on bringing local startups to the market. China is a notoriously hard market for outside companies to be successful in, yet there are ways to achieve this, Lee said when presenting his two latest projects.

Lee argues that western companies can be successful in China, but have to adapt to the local conditions. It's not enough to have the technological edge, as many foreign companies do, they have to leverage it within the confines of the local market.

Specifically, they must rely on people with knowledge of the market and trust them to develop a strategy catered to China. Their general approach may not be suitable for China, for most companies. This shouldn't be much of a surprise for those following the Chinese market.

But Lee says that the technological advantage can also help. For Google, which he led in China after leaving Microsoft, it was useful. This is how Google managed to get a significant share of the market dominated by Baidu.

But Baidu evolved in time and the technological advantage became less obvious. Baidu "became good enough," Lee says. With the government strongly encouraging local solutions and with a public more likely to use domestic products, it was an uphill battle for Google, like any other foreign company.

The standoff with the Chinese government certainly hasn't helped. Google announced earlier this year that it will not be censoring search results anymore in China. As a solution it moved its Chinese search infrastructure to its Hong Kong servers.

From there it provided un-censored search results, however, the pages that reached the Chinese public went through the so-called Great China Firewall, filtered for content deemed undesirable by the Chinese government. Lee declined to comment on the whole Google - China dispute.