After tense negotiations, China has renewed Google's ICP (Internet Content Provider) license, meaning that Google will continue to operate as a search engine in China.
The future of Google.cn recently became very unpredictable. Google was redirecting traffic from its Chinese search engine to its (uncensored) Hong Kong search engine, Google.com.hk, but it became apparent that the Chinese government wouldn't renew Google's ICP license if Google continued with the practice.
Google then changed its approach, and instead of automatically redirecting traffic, the company started displaying a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk. According to an update on Google's official blog post on the matter today, it seems that this new tactic worked.
"We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP license and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China," wrote Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond.