Google’s move has produced ripple effects that go well beyond China’s vast internet market. It has potentially opened up a new Sino-US dispute and shone a rare light on the thoroughly 21st century world of cyberattacks.

In recent years, the net has provided a curious twist to modern Chinese society and its mixture of authoritarianism and a market economy. Most people who spend time with Chinese university students acquire the same impressions: they will be earnest, smart as a whip and very interested in the outside world. The internet is their main window on that world. And there are 300m Chinese web users. How come a big chunk are not hopping mad about censorship?

The reason is that the censors’ “Great Firewall of China” is actually shot through with holes. Sophisticated filters exist to identify controversial words, while legions of monitors keep an eye on chat-rooms. But if you are really determined to access a site, it is relatively easy to do so, using either a proxy or a virtual private network (VPN).

The overall effect of the web censorship is to prevent widespread dissemination of damaging news about pollution or tainted food, but it does not stop the engaged and curious minority from gaining information.

Some young Chinese see it as a badge of honour to dodge the restrictions, and say the foreign media exaggerate the level of censorship. “We eventually get to find out what we want,” the blogger Foxhuo said last summer. “Westerners would be wrong to think that China has no freedom at all.” Nothing about this reality will be changed if Google does shut up shop in Beijing and close its Chinese search engine. With a VPN, Chinese internet users can even search for sensitive content using Google’s US website.

There are many people who think Google’s move has more to do with a face-saving business exit than principle. If Google’s market share were 70 per cent and not 30 per cent, would it still be thinking about quitting China? And ever since the democracy protests of 1989, western observers have sought signs of revolt among urban Chinese where little existed. By and large, the emerging educated middle class has been the vanguard of the regime, not its soft underbelly.

“The majority of Chinese internet users will forget this incident in no more than three months and only few people will remember it occasionally, like ripples on a pool of water,” Xiang Ligang, a tech analyst, said on his blog on Thursday. He could be right. But reading the thousands of comments on the net in China that have been largely in favour of Google, it is clear that something very interesting is going on.

“Sending flowers to Google was a way to encourage and urge more overseas corporations to stick to their conscience,” said one Tweet. “I definitely support Google: do not bow your head to the Celestial Kingdom,” said another comment.

A clumsy public battle with Google could have all sorts of unpredictable consequences. Google may have been on the losing end commercially, but its presence in China has symbolic importance. Censorship or not, the internet has been a central part of the package of China-style modernity that the government has offered the educated middle class: an emblem of engagement with the world. Yet over the past six months, net users have seen Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all blocked. And many in the academic community, in particular, have been stunned by the punishment meted out to Liu Xiaobo.

A Google withdrawal would feel to some like a further turn inwards. As one blogger put it: “It’s not Google that is withdrawing from China – it’s China that’s withdrawing from the world.”