Basic story...
google wanted a share of the china market. So, they decided to play along with the government and censor the search results.
Now, google decided to no longer censor them. Wether because they are altruistic...or because they haven't managed to set foot on the chinese market...is up to ones personal view
So now they shut down the chinese site (.cn) and instead route it to the hong kong one. As you may know, hong kong has a lot of special regulations, so they don't need to censor there.
Cheers
FF
There are 10 kind of people in the world.
Those who understand binary numeral system, and those who don't.