Google, which quit China in 2010 in protest over Beijing's strict censorship policies, is not relaunching its services in the country without the "right conditions," CEO Sundar Pichai has said.
Google faced outrage last year when it was reported that the company may have been looking to get back into the search engine business in China, the world's second largest economy.
In an interview to CNN, the 46-year-old Indian-origin CEO of Google said the company was not actively working on a new Chinese search engine, though he acknowledged that Google was ignoring China and its hundreds of millions of internet users.
"There are no plans for us to consider relaunching our service in China," Pichai said. He added, "we have always looked at serving the next billion users....Our mission compass is to provide information."
Though China doesn't share Google's value of a free and open internet, the company, reaching more users is "always a set of continued conversations we have at Google."
"I don't want to speculate on a hypothetical situation," he said. "We have no plans. And, you know, we are not spending time on it."
When asked to respond to US General Joseph Dunford's claim that Google's work in China "is a direct benefit" to the nation's military, Pichai said Google had "good conversations" about that controversy and said it has "cleared up any misunderstandings."
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