China Is Still Reviewing Google's License .

A man rides a motobike past the logo of Google's China headquarters in Beijing on June 30, 2010.

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said it is still examining Google Inc.'s application to renew its content license, in the government's first comments on the U.S. company's status since it announced last month it was changing how users in China access its search service.
Wang Lijian, spokesman for the ministry, said Google's application for annual renewal of its Internet content provider license came close to the end-of-June deadline, pushing back the approval process. "As Google submitted the application in late June, it is impossible to finish the examination in such a short time," Mr. Wang said.
Google's fate in China was called into question anew after it said on June 28 that it had re-submitted its application to renew the license after altering its Chinese search home page in response to government criticism. The regulator had objected to Google's strategy of redirecting Chinese users who tried to access its Chinese address, google.cn, to a site in Hong Kong that Google doesn't censor.
Google had adopted that strategy in March, saying it was no longer willing to comply with China's self-censorship rules because of the government's tightening limits on free speech and because of a series of cyberattacks that Google said originated in China.
The Internet content license Google uses technically expires in 2012, but must be renewed annually. Without a license, Google likely wouldn't be able to use its mainland Chinese search address.
Since the June 28 change, visitors to google.cn have been presented with a message in Chinese that says, "We have moved to google.com.hk." Users must then click on an image to get to the Hong Kong site, instead of being automatically redirected as before. If google.cn were to stop working, mainland Chinese users could still access the Hong Kong site directly, unless China's government choose to block access to it.
Mr. Wang declined to say whether approval was likely for Google. Many analysts had expected the company to encounter trouble with its Chinese site since it first announced plans in January to stop filtering its Chinese search results, a move that marked a highly unusual public slap by a foreign company at Beijing's censorship practices.