Yesterday I blogged about Google's heroic stand against China's censorship of the web and apparent massive espionage efforts to spy on Human Rights advocates:  Enough's enough, Google threatens to pull the plug in China

Today an equally heroic gesture has been made in solidarity with Google by Yahoo.  In a statement Wednesday, Yahoo said it's "aligned" with Google's reaction to the hacking that originated within China.

Yahoo's stake in China is much more significant to Yahoo as an asset then goole.cn is to Google, and that is very substantial.  Yahoo retains a 39 percent stake in Alibaba that represents one of Yahoo's most valuable assets.

Alibaba.comoperates two key online marketplaces, an international marketplace and a China marketplace. The company's English-language international marketplace (www.alibaba.com) serves to bring together global importers and exporters from more than 240 countries and regions. The China marketplace (www.alibaba.com.cn) is focused on facilitating domestic trade within China. The company also operates a Japanese-language marketplace facilitating trade to and from Japan through an associated company.

The company claims that together the two marketplaces have more than 45 million registered users - 10.5 million in the international marketplace and 34.8 million in the China marketplace.  As of mid-2009, Alibaba.com had more than 9,000 employees - the vast majority of whom are based in China.

The stakes are now very high and when you throw in the US governments officially announced support for the actions of Google this is turning into a very big deal, the kind of thing that can spiral out of control or actually cause real change.