San Francisco:
Google plans to stop automatically sending users in mainland Chinese to its uncensored Hong Kong site, in an effort to appease Beijing as it seeks to renew its license to operate in China.
The action, experts on China say, amounts to a symbolic gesture that Google hopes will placate the Chinese government, which may be feeling pressure from citizens who are demanding continued access to Google's search engine.
Google may also be hoping the Chinese government wants to avoid another showdown over Web censorship on the eve of a coming visit to the United States by President Hu Jintao.
Since it said earlier this year that it could no longer justify filtering its search results in China to meet government requirements, Google has found a clever way to continue to operate in the country.
It has automatically redirected Chinese users to google.com.hk, which is maintained on the company's servers in Hong Kong.
But the Chinese government has objected to that solution. According to a Google blog post published Monday night written by David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, Beijing was prepared to reject Google's application for renewal of its Internet content provider license, which would effectively mean the company would have to shut down its Web site in the country entirely.
The license renewal application is due on Wednesday.
Mr. Drummond wrote that in an effort to continue to serve Google's Chinese users while satisfying the government, the company was proposing a compromise.
Instead of being automatically redirected, Chinese users will see a page at google.cn with a single link to the Hong Kong site, where they can conduct searches or use other Google services, like translation and music.
"This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page," Mr. Drummond wrote.
The company said it had resubmitted its content provider license based on this tactic and hoped the Chinese government would find it more palatable.
"Google is trying to show a little accommodation," said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "They have to show they are at least willing to engage with the Chinese and make them happy."
The company appears to have made the compromise out of concern that Beijing is preparing to entirely shut down google.cn, which could confuse users in China and leave them with no notice that they can reach the Hong Kong site.
Because users have grown accustomed to visiting google.cn, that could hurt Google's traffic in China, the world's largest Internet market.
China's foreign ministry declined to comment on Tuesday.
Until January, Google censored its search results on behalf of the government. This drew intense criticism from civil rights advocates in the West, and in March the company shut down its China-based search engine and directed its users to the Hong Kong site.
Under the current setup in mainland China, the search results from Hong Kong are not censored, but the sites they link to can be blocked by government filters. This has the effect of making it clearer to users that the Chinese government is doing the filtering, not Google.
Hong Kong is part of China but is still largely independently governed in the wake of its transition from British rule, and the Chinese government does not control the news media or the Internet there.
Google may be betting that political considerations in China will make it likely that Beijing will accept this latest move and refrain from pushing Google out of the country entirely.
Last week, Mr. Hu accepted an invitation from President Obama to visit the United States. The visit, which has not yet been officially scheduled, would probably be overshadowed by a showdown over Internet censorship.
"One of the things the Chinese didn't know when they started this is that Google is this administration's favorite child," said Mr. Lewis. As a result, he said, "I don't think they will do anything to block Google before the presidential visit."
Beijing may also be facing internal pressures to relax its hard-line stance against the company.
"There is a little bit of pressure on the government over the way it handled Google," said Kenneth J. Dewoskin, a senior adviser to Deloitte in Beijing. "This next step Google is taking may be something the government is comfortable with, because the people who really need to access Google will go to the extra trouble, while it could gradually discourage the larger user base."
Google has competitive reasons for renewing its license in China and securing a future for itself there. Baidu, China's leading search engine, will start hiring software engineers directly from the United States next month, as it seeks to expand its technological capabilities and raise its global profile, Reuters reported from Shanghai on Tuesday.
Baidu stands to be the biggest beneficiary if Google's presence in China shrinks.
(Brad Stone reported from San Francisco and David Barboza from Shanghai.)