Google is calling China's bluff. The online search giant has announced that it is “no longer willing” to censor results on its Chinese site. It will now talk with the Beijing government about the basis on which it would be possible to run “an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all”. This is a bold stand, and could well lead to Google being barred from an important emerging marketplace

China is still a poor country, but multinational companies want to establish themselves in a market of 1.3bn increasingly prosperous people. The authoritarian rulers of this continental economy have, until now, been able to force news, media, online search and software companies to comply with their onerous censorship requirements.

Microsoft and Yahoo both run local search sites that conform to these rules. Since 2006, so has Google, although in a form that gives users more details about when information is being kept from them. The decision to go along with the restrictions has been the subject of fierce debate, not least within Google itself.