Google said Thursday that it was in talks with China on the future of the US Internet giant in the Asian nation, after the firm threatened to leave over cyber attacks and state web censorship.

"We are indeed in active discussions with the Chinese government but we are not going to engage in a running commentary about those conversations," Google China spokeswoman Marsha Wang told AFP.
 

"We've been very clear that we are no longer going to self-censor our search results."
 

The comments came after a top Google executive told US lawmakers Wednesday that the company was prepared to leave China, the world's biggest online market, if it was forced to continue censoring its web search engine.
 

"Google is firm in its decision that it will stop censoring our search results for China," Google vice president and deputy general counsel Nicole Wong told the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

Prepared to leave
"If the option is that we'll shutter our .cn operation and leave the country, we are prepared to do that," she said at a hearing on the relationship between Internet technology and aiding democratic activists around the world.
 

Google threatened in January to leave China over what it said were cyber attacks aimed at its source code and at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.
 

In the meantime, Google has continued to filter results on its Chinese language search engine, Google.cn, and posted ads for dozens of positions in China, which has the world's largest number of Internet users at 384 million.
 

Source: AFP