Beijing silent over Google offer

Chinese regulators remained silent on Wednesday over whether they would allow Google to keep its website in China following the US company’s latest compromise offer.

Wang Chen, head of the Information Office of the State Council, told reporters: “We’ve long said that to develop in China, you must abide by Chinese laws.”

Mr Wang is one of the officials in charge of censoring the internet in China, but the regulator responsible for renewing Google’s Internet Content Provider licence is the Ministry of Industry and Information Industry.

On Tuesday Google dashed hopes that its move to redirect users of its Chinese site to its uncensored Hong Kong web page had settled its dispute with the Chinese government over censorship.

The company said Beijing was unwilling to renew its ICP licence – a precondition for operating its Google.com site – if Google continued redirecting users. In response, Google created a “landing page” on Google.cn which offers visitors an optional link to the Hong Kong site, in a last-ditch effort to retain its Chinese presence.

Global Times, a tabloid newspaper owned by People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist party, quoted scholars saying Google’s move was only a technical change. The company had not changed its attitude, the paper said.

Beifeng, a prominent blogger and internet commentator, said on Twitter: “I think the authorities will not give Google.cn any further chance.”

Many Chinese internet users sympathetic to Google said it was not worth fighting with the government.

Beijing had given Google a deadline of Wednesday for submitting its application for annual renewal of its ICP licence.

But as the ICP licence is handed out for five years, and Google’s is valid until 2012, the government is not under time pressure to hand down a final decision. Observers said it was hard to tell how long it would take to respond to Google’s latest step.

The government sent another negative signal by approving applications by a number of Chinese companies for a licence to offer online mapping services, but not including Google. The State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping published a list of 18 companies that it said had been approved, including Baidu, the local online search market leader.