Just as cicadas thrum more urgently at the start of autumn, sensing that the end is nigh, internet users in China have been seizing in animated fashion on what one called “the last crazy days of Google.cn”.

With the US technology giant allowing uncensored searches in Chinese for the first time, citizens of the People's Republic are this week indulging their curiosity ahead of a widely expected crackdown.

“I've been doing all sorts of crazy searches, really distracting myself from my work,” says one. “I've done Tiananmen Square, the love affairs of national leaders, the corruption of leaders' children. Everything.”

Another internet user says the buzz of illicit abandon is reminiscent of the mood in Tiananmen Square itself, shortly before the People's Liberation Army crushed the protests there in 1989. “There is no way that Google will get away with this. They will have to leave China for sure,” he adds.

The surreptitious joys of “netizens” may not be alone in existing on borrowed time. Google's defiance of China's censorship regime is indicative of much more than a single company's decision to reassert its open-society principles over the pragmatism by which it originally entered the Chinese market, agreeing then to self-censor in return for business licences. Google's move may suggest that the accommodations made by western companies in China can extend only so far before contorted values snap back into place.

More broadly, though, Google's actions present at least a symbolic challenge to a broad swath of assumptions that has underpinned the west's engagement with China over the past 30 years. In particular, they raise the question as to whether missionary capitalism – the prevalent but fuzzy belief that the west's commercial engagement may somehow bring about a Chinese political liberalisation – has ever been more than a naive hope.

In Google's experience, for example, the longer it operated in China, the more search words it was forced to ban and the greater the number of cyberattacks it fielded from Chinese sources.

In fact, in the opinion of several Chinese officials, the process of engagement in which successive US and other western governments have invested so much time and effort, may not have enamoured the Chinese public to the west at all. One senior Communist party official, speaking on condition of anonymity several weeks prior to Google's move, said he saw a general regression in public disposition to the west.

“Even though Chinese, and especially Chinese youth, know the west better than ever before and there are many more exchanges and contacts between China and your countries than in the past, the west is less popular now among Chinese people than at any time since ‘reform and opening' began [in 1978],” the official said. Indeed, anyone who regularly reads the postings of Chinese netizens will notice that comments critical of the west frequently far outnumber those that are positive.

Against this backdrop, Google's decision prompts one of the simplest but furthest-reaching questions of all: how should the west deal with China? Or, to put a finer point on it, how can an international system created under Pax Americana to serve the interests of the west accommodate a rising giant that is set to remain different in almost every aspect – politics, values, history, natural endowments and per capita wealth – from the incumbent ruling order?

Even posing the question can elicit shock. James Mann, a former Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, notes in his 2007 book, The China Fantasy, that although it is still theoretically possible that the country may yet morph into a democracy that promotes civil liberties and fosters an independent judiciary, the belief that this is a likely outcome is sheer self-delusion.