Google is ramping up its efforts in China.
BBC News is reporting that the tech giant is rolling out the blueprint in expanding its overall presence in China. This comes after Google co-founder Sergey Brin vowed to return services to China last week.
It also marks a dramatic turnaround from five years ago, when Google pulled its services from the country's mainland, refusing to self-censor its search results for any longer. The tech giant had also accused the Chinese government of orchestrating a cyber attack on it, in addition to other tech companies.
All being said, Google seems to take issue with implication that it's returning to China.
"[Google] has lots of partners [in China] and we have offices in Greater China — in Taiwan and Hong Kong," Google chairman Eric Schmidt said at the recent TechCrunch Beijing conference, as reported by the BBC. "The interesting thing is that Google never left China."
Schmidt added that the company has been having regular correspondence with China's government about its services and overall presence in the country.
Although, it still isn't clear about what Google is planning in China, local reports in the country are speculating that it could be the tech juggernaut launching a Chinese version of Google Play. That speculation is only fueled by additional local reports of Google registering domains named: googleplaychinaedition.com and googlechinaedition.com.
While speaking at the conference, Schmidt also gave credit to the overall rising level of business in China and Google's new smartphone collaborator Huawei.
"The level of entrepreneurialism [in Beijing and Shanghai] is probably ... close to the highest in the world," Schmidt said. "Many people thought that the level of innovation and science would take much longer to achieve [in China]."
