It sounds like growing pains to me in a lot of ways. China isn't used to having to kowtow to others in doing business. They have their own internal controls, regulations and laws, and they're still testing the limits of what they can get away with.

Was the Google outage a shot across Google's bow, or merely a glitch? We'll probably never know the truth. This outage was relatively short though, which may be more revealing in a way.