Google LLC is set to return to mainland China eight years after leaving, as leaked internal documents today show it’s building a version of its Android search app that will comply with the Middle Kingdom’s censorship regime.

The documents, provided by an unnamed Google employee to The Intercept, show that Google engineers at its Mountain View, California head office have been working on a project called “Dragonfly” since the spring of 2017. In addition, The Information reported that Google is developing a compliant Chinese news aggregation app as well.

The work followed a meeting between Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official. Although there’s not direct evidence, the implication is that Google may have been given the green light to return to China if it complies with government restrictions.

Google is said to have created a custom Android app that has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government. The report claimed that a finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending formal approval from Chinese officials.

The app would censor search queries and results in compliance with China’s Golden Shield Project, better known in the West at the Great Firewall of China. Established by the country’s communist rulers in 1998, Golden Shield is an all-encompassing censorship regime that prohibits Chinese citizens in mainland China, not including Hong Kong and Macau, from reading information that the government doesn’t want them to.

What has been censored in China’s has varied somewhat over the years. But it primarily consists of political content, including anything to do with democracy, human rights, nonapproved religions and protests as well as pornography and any service that does not implement censorship to comply with Golden Shield policies.

Sites and services blocked in China include Facebook, Snapchap, Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, various news outlets and leading porn sites such as Pornhub.

The new app will block illicit sites and search queries with the former simply not showing in search results while search queries using illicit terms will simply deliver a “no results found” message.

Google previously operated in China between 2006 and 2010 with a mostly compliant search service but exited the country in 2010 citing attempts to “limit free speech on the web.” However, by that point it had mostly been blocked anyway for not fully complying with the requirements of Golden Shield.

Fast forward eight years, and Chinese internet companies are some of the largest on the planet, with much of their success forged on an uneven home playing field on which western companies have been unable to compete.

There were an estimated 772 million internet users in China as of the end of last year, with internet availability sitting at only 55.8 percent of the population. With a population of just under 1.4 billion people, hundreds of millions of people are yet to come online, an untapped market that is roughly double that of the entirely of the population of the U.S. — a fact Google knows.

Not everyone is positive about the potential for Google to return to China. Mizuho Bank Ltd. tech analyst James Lee saying in a note to investors that he thinks it’s unlike to happen in the near term because of the current strained trade relations between the two countries.

“The search market in China has matured faster than the U.S. so it is less attractive from the financial point of view,” Lee said. “Based on our checks, Google had a chance to re-enter China a few years ago with YouTube and Play Store, but both times the company declined for various reasons.”

Others opposed the news on moral grounds. Patrick Poon, China researcher at Amnesty International, said that “it will be a dark day for internet freedom if Google has acquiesced to China’s extreme censorship rules to gain market access. It is impossible to see how such a move is compatible with Google’s ‘Do the right thing’ motto, and we are calling on the company to change course.”

Photo: Andrew Eland/Flickr