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Google Inc. said late Monday that it will stop automatically redirecting visitors from in China site to one in Hong Kong, a practice it started in March to defuse its censorship fight with Beijing.

The company said Chinese officials threatened not to renew their license to operate an Internet site in their country if they continued to redirect traffic to the unfiltered site in Hong Kong where censorship restrictions are more relaxed.

The license was set to expire on Wednesday.

The new plan is to show a message telling visitors at the China site that Google had moved to the Hong Kong Web address. It's not clear if this will be enough to satisfy officials in Beijing.

"Ever since we launched Google.cn, our search engine for mainland Chinese users, we have done our best to increase access to information while abiding by Chinese law payday loan online. This has not always been an easy balance to strike, especially since our January announcement that we were no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn.," Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said on the company's official blog.

Google's dispute with Chinese officials began after it said it would no longer go along with requirement that it censor its search results and sites in that country. This came in the wake of a hacking incident the company said originated in China that targeted human rights activists.

For more of the Business Journal's in-depth coverage of Google's China situation, click here.

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