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Google situation in China 'seems to be stable': CEO

AFP

Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO of Google, sits for an interview at the Newseum in Washington, DC, on 2 October 2009.File photo/Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/US

Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said Thursday that the Internet giant’s situation in China “seems to be stable” following its decision two months ago to stop censoring Web search results.

Schimdt, speaking at Google’s annual shareholders meeting at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, said Google has “maintained our business relationships and our engineering centers in China.

“The situation seems to be stable,” the Google chief executive said in response to a question from a shareholder, although he added that it could always change.

“Should the Chinese government become upset with us, or become further upset with us or what have you, they do have the ability to change this outcome,” he said at the meeting which was streamed live on Google-owned YouTube.

“From Google’s perspective we made our decision, we’ve implemented it, we want to continue to serve the Chinese citizens,” Schmidt said. “We want to continue our business operations in China.”

Google’s relations with China have been strained since the Internet giant announced in January that it and a number of other companies had been targeted by sophisticated China-based cyberattacks.

Google last month stopped censoring Web search results on its Chinese search engine and began redirecting users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong, a move which was praised by a number of shareholders on Thursday.

“We made a decision to move our search services to Hong Kong. Remember it’s ‘one country, two systems’ — we like the other system better,” Schmidt said.

“In the other system, there’s a firewall censorship barrier between Hong Kong and mainland China and that barrier is providing the censorship so that Google does not have to under their law,” he said.

“By moving our search services to Hong Kong we were able to operate legally in China under a different set of rules than had we maintained them in Beijing,” he said.

Copyright © 2010 AFP

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