Google seeks to return to China

Having withdrawn from the mainland Chinese market in 2010, Google is pursuing to return to China again. The story explained that Google has been in talks with Chinese government officials for more than a year now about launching a new Google play app store where applications and services approved by the government are provided.

A new Android-based smartphone where those apps can be installed and is dedicated for Chinese market can be introduced within the year, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. China’s Huawei Technologies Co. will launch a new Android phone under Google’s Nexus brand in the U.S. in coming weeks, raising expectations that it may also make an Android phone compatible with a new Play store for China.

In 2010 when Chinese hackers cyberattacked Gmail (Google’s email service) accounts of human right’s activists of China, which prodded Beijing to fortify the censorship on search words in Google sites, the company ceased its operation in the mainland China and moved to Hongkong. Since then, China has risen as the world’s largest smartphone market where Apple, Google’s major rival, is taking the lead.

Google’s Android operating system is the world’s most popular for smartphones but isn’t available in the Chinese market. That has given a window of opportunity for other mobile phone makers such as Xiaomi and One Plus to become new competition by developing independent versions of Android. Now that, Baidu, a Chinese web service company, has been destroying Google’s stronghold with their own apps, Google has decided to return to China.

Change in the Google’s management was another reason. Sergey Brin who is from the former Soviet Union and the straightforward critics of the Chinese government with deep antipathy to totalitarianism has recently stepped back from day-to-day operations and moved to Alphabet, Google’s holding company, as a president. Instead, former Product Chief Sundar Pichai who said, “The company was committed to serving the Chinese market the best we can” became the CEO of the company.

In the long term, Google wishes to resume its services of Internet search and Gmail, which are more sensitive than getting approval for app store since it requires the company to succumb to Beijing who demands user data to be stored and censorship imposed. Some expect, however, that once Google play store and its Android-based phone enters China, it will use that to push for more of its services to be unblocked in the country.

confetti@donga.com