March 26, 2010 (Friday) at 12:58 PM, I received an email from Google with the following content:

To Our Valued Publisher Customers: Latest Statement on Google China

Dear Publishers,

Since Google published its statement about our operations in China in January, we’ve received many inquiries about “what will happen to Google China,” especially regarding our advertising platform. We’ve been working to find ways to continue providing search services to Chinese users. Thank you for your patience.

On the morning of March 23rd, Google released a statement: Mainland China users visiting Google.cn will now be automatically redirected to Google.com.hk. Mainland China users will continue to receive our Simplified Chinese services through servers located in Hong Kong.

We will continue to provide comprehensive advertising solutions to content publishers. Content-based AdSense content ads and AdSense mobile content ads will display without impact. The DFP Ad Manager (formerly “Google Ad Manager”) will also continue to operate normally.

If you’re using Google Search Ads (AFS) or Google Search Alliance (SDO), please closely follow the latest information in your AdSense account for related technical changes.

We appreciate your patience and look forward to continuing our cooperation. For details and updates, please visit this blog at: www.google.com/press/shengming.

Best regards,

Google AdSense Team

We’re sending this required email service notice to inform you about major changes to AdSense products or your account.

Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043, USA

Details as follows:

Latest Statement on Google China

March 23, 2010

David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

On January 12th of this year, we announced on this blog that Google and over twenty other U.S. companies had suffered sophisticated cyber attacks originating from China. During our in-depth investigation of these attacks, evidence we collected showed that dozens of Gmail accounts belonging to human rights activists connected to China were regularly accessed by third parties, mostly through phishing software or malware installed on their computers. These attacks and the internet censorship issues they exposed, combined with China’s further restrictions on internet freedom of speech since last year—including the continued blocking of sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs, and Blogger—led us to conclude: we could no longer continue self-censorship on Google.cn search results.

Starting this morning, we have stopped self-censoring on Google.cn search services, including Google Search (web search), Google News (news search), and Google Images (image search). Users visiting Google.cn will now be directed to Google.com.hk, where we will provide uncensored Simplified Chinese search results. These services designed for mainland China users will be delivered through our servers in Hong Kong. Hong Kong users will continue to receive the same uncensored Traditional Chinese search services through Google.com.hk. During this migration, due to increased server load in Hong Kong and the complexity of these changes, users may notice slower search speeds or find some products temporarily inaccessible.

Implementing our commitment to stop censoring search results on Google.cn has been an extremely difficult process. We hope as many users as possible worldwide can access our services, including users in mainland China. The Chinese government has made it very clear during discussions with us that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. Therefore, we believe a viable solution to the challenges we face is to provide uncensored Simplified Chinese search results on Google.com.hk—it fully complies with legal requirements while also improving information access for mainland China users. We very much hope the Chinese government will respect this decision, although we know that user access to Google services could be blocked at any time. To this end, we will closely monitor access issues and have created a new page where users can see in real-time which Google services are available in China.

As for Google’s broader business operations, we plan to continue R&D work in China and will retain our sales team, though the size of the sales team will obviously depend partly on whether mainland China users can access Google.com.hk. Finally, we want to make clear: all these decisions were made and implemented by the U.S. management team, and no Chinese employee can or should be held responsible for these decisions. Since we published our blog in January, despite facing many uncertainties and difficulties, they have remained at their posts, dedicated to serving our Chinese users and customers. We are deeply proud of such employees.

Availability of Google services in mainland China: