Jessica Guynn

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is again signaling strong interest in returning to China, six years after the Internet giant pulled its search engine out of the mainland and stopped censoring Internet search results as required by local law.

"We left in 2010 because they had strict rules on censorship," Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google's parent company Alphabet, said Thursday during an interview with journalist Charlie Rose at an event sponsored by The Economic Club of New York. "We keep trying. I spend a lot of time trying to reopen it."

This week Google CEO Sundar Pichai made his most forceful statement yet on China.

"I care about servicing users globally in every corner. Google is for everyone," Pichai said Wednesday during the Code conference. "We want to be in China serving Chinese users."

For years, Google has spoken publicly about its desire to expand in China, yet it has offered no specifics nor has it said what concessions it would be willing to make.

"We’re being thoughtful about it," Pichai said.

One hurdle: The censorship that prompted Google's exit has likely gotten more restrictive in the years since it left.

"I find it odd that Google wants back in China at a time when, owing to the county's increasingly servere economic challenges, censorship in China will likely be even more strict and pervasive than it was a few years ago when Google determined it could not operate in such an environment," said international trade economist Jock O'Connell.

Yet with Google and other U.S. technology companies forfeiting billions of dollars a year, "the market is simply too big for Google to ignore," said UCLA business professor Christopher Tang.

Google has made some recent moves in China. In October, Google made its first direct investment in the country since 2010, in artificial intelligence company Mobvoi. And Google hopes to open a local version of its Google Play mobile app store to tap the world's largest mobile phone market.

The company still exerts influence in the world's largest Internet market. Its Android software powers most of the country's top-selling smartphones and Google runs a significant mobile and advertising business in China. But Google no longer offers search, which is dominated by local competitor Baidu, and Android-powered phones lack the Google apps familiar to users outside China. China's government blocks Google's Gmail, search services and YouTube.

Other tech giants with big ambitions for China have also been largely shut out. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg frequently courts China's government but Facebook is banned there. The giant social network has built a sizable business pitching Chinese companies on reaching Facebook’s 1.6 billion users beyond China’s borders.

Even Google rival Apple, which has been viewed as a success story in China, its second-largest market, has run into trouble there. Its stock has slid, in part, on slowing sales in China's smartphone market.

CEO Tim Cook paid a visit to Beijing in May to trumpet Apple's $1 billion investment in Didi, China's ride-hailing company and Uber rival. That deal came after Chinese regulators tightened control over web content, forcing Apple to shutter its digital book and movie services in April.

If anything, China's government has tightened control of the Internet during Google's absence, Schmidt said last week during comments at the Startup Fest Europe in Amsterdam.

Schmidt said Google withdrew from China in 2010 because it was uncomfortable with local laws "which have not gotten better since we left."

University of Virginia professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry, says operating in China is a fraught proposition for major U.S. tech companies these days.

"If I ran a major global corporation, I would want to do business with China, too. But doing heavy business on the ground in China is high cost and high risk right now," Vaidhyanathan said. "Google like every other company would love to have normalized relations with China and just be able to do its business, but it's not likely to happen anytime soon."

Contributing: Adam Shell