Google announced Friday that China had renewed its license to operate in the world's largest market, at least for another year.

The announcement comes after the Chinese government looked likely to shut down the Google.cn web site in late June, six months after Google started a showdown with the Communist regime by saying it would no longer censor search results as it had agreed to when it entered China in 2006.

The renewal followed another clever concession from Google, which initially resolved the problem by automatically redirecting all mainland Chinese searchers to its uncensored Hong Kong search site, Google.com.hk. While brazen, the automatic redirect initially placated authorities.

By the end of June the government made it clear it wasn't enough. Google then put up a facsimile of a search box on Google.cn, which when clicked on, takes users to Google.com.hk.

The extra click seemed to do the trick.

"In China, it is very common that you need to give the government face if you want to do business here," Edward Yu of Analysys International told Reuters. "The double-click rule (so as not to automatically reroute searches) shows that Google can compromise and give them face."

Google downplayed the announcement – one sentence tacked on to a 10-day-old blog post by chief legal officer David Drummond in which the company announced the end of the automatic redirect.

"We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP [Internet Content Provider] license, and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China," the update simply said.

Google's decision 11 days ago to completely abandon the auto-redirect appears to have been a key concession to stay in the country, where it has a number of business interests in addition to search. But doing so likely means giving up on lucrative search partnerships with ISPs, portals and mobile phone makers, because no one wants a default search engine they have to double-click to use. Instead, those lucrative partnerships will likely go to Baidu, a Chinese search company that dominates the search market in China.

The game of cat and mouse began when Google unexpectedly warned in January it might quit the country over censorship concerns, after suffering a hacker attack it said came from within China.

Only two days ago China said there would be no particular deadline for the review and that Google's submission for renewal had been "relatively late." ICP licenses are reviewed annually in China.

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