The uneasy truce between Google and China broke down yesterday when the company announced it would no longer censor search results on its domestic search engine, Google.cn. So far everyone seems fixated on the decision-making in the Googleplex headquarters, but ultimately this episode tells us more about Beijing than it does about Google.

Within minutes of the announcement, mainland users were calling up page listings on Tibet, Falun Gong and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre that had been hidden for...