Speaking about his departure, Kai-Fu Lee gave the usually vague "moving on to pursue other ventures" statement, which might mean that he's starting his own project. "With a very strong leadership team in place, it seemed a very good moment for me to move to the next chapter in my career," he said.
This sudden departure of Kai-Fu Lee, who jumped ship from Microsoft to lead Google China in 2005., is only one of Google's troubles related to the enormous Chinese market. Although Google's search market share in China had grown under Lee's leadership, they're still trailing behind Baidu, which is still the search engine of choice for most users there.
Furthermore, the Chinese government has at times blocked and/or censored several Google properties, such as Google Search and YouTube, which showed that even a giant like Google is not untouchable when it comes to Chinese censorship. For a company that's doing so well everywhere else, Google's China operations so far simply haven't been good enough, and it'll be interesting to see where the new leadership takes them.