Chinese State Media: Google Can Return As Long As It Follows Laws

Google’s widely used search engine has been blocked in China for years, but Google apparently wants to bring it back with some caveats. An opinion piece in the Chinese state-sanctioned newspaper People’s Daily ran an opinion piece on Monday explaining that Google will be welcome back, as long as it follows China’s strict internet rules, according to CNBC.

The People’s Daily piece is no longer online, but CNBC captured screenshots and quotes from it. The piece called Google a “politicized brand,” which is a “tragedy” for the company. It criticized Google leaving China in 2010 due to harsh western reception of its decision to operate in the populous country by censoring search results.

The most noteworthy part of the People’s Daily piece is that it said Google can return to China, “but it’s a prerequisite that it must comply with the requirements of the law.” The article was marked as an opinion piece and was taken down from the People’s Daily website after publication, so its validity as an official state stance is unknown.

The Intercept reported last week that Google had plans to return to China, even internally developing a custom Android app that has been shown to Chinese government officials. Google has been blocked in China for years due to the “Great Firewall” policy that aims to block pornography, violence, western news sources and more in the country.

According to The Intercept, Google’s return to China would involve automatically filtering out anything deemed undesirable by the Great Firewall. Certain search queries would bring back no results at all. This censorship would carry across image search and other important parts of Google’s umbrella, not just the basic web search feature.

In Google’s absence, a search engine called Baidu has reigned supreme in China. Baidu CEO Robin Li said Baidu would win a battle with Google should Google return to China. However, some users on China’s Twitter-like social network Weibo said they would rather use Google if it came back, according to CNET.

Google is joined by other major U.S. tech firms like Facebook and Twitter in being blocked in China. However, some of those companies have invested in China in other ways. Google recently invested $550 million in Chinese retail site JD.com, while Facebook reportedly plans to open an innovation hub in the Zhejiang province.