At Google’s annual shareholders meeting today, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the search engine’s situation in China, “seems to be stable.”
Asked by a shareholder, Schmidt elaborated according to the AFP with the following quotes that were streamed live on YouTube:
“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…
“From Google’s perspective we made our decision, we’ve implemented it, we want to continue to serve the Chinese citizens. We want to continue our business operations in China.”
“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.”
Read our previous coverage of Google China here.
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