GOOGLE Inc's application to renew its Chinese Website license is currently under review, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said yesterday.

But the ministry didn't give a deadline for the license review.

It was the Chinese regulator's latest response regarding the fate of Google China, which recently stopped redirecting automatically web searchers on China's mainland to its Hong Kong site and applied to renew its license in the world's largest Internet market last month.

"Google's annual check-in is under way but there's no detailed deadline for the result because its submission is relatively late," said ministry spokesperson Wang Lijian.

The ministry is the body responsible for renewing and reviewing Internet content provider licenses.

Google shut down its mainland-based search engine on March 22 and rerouted users to its Hong Kong site.

It stopped the automatic redirect because regulators told the company its Internet license would not be renewed if it kept it going.

"We re-applied for the license at the end of last month and we are waiting for the results now," said Marsha Wang, Google China's spokesperson.

At present, only "music," "translate" and "shopping" links, in Chinese, appear on the Google China webpage.

Visitors to google.cn will also see a tab that says, in English, "We have moved to google.com.hk."

Clicking on that takes users to the Chinese-language site in Hong Kong.

Google clearly doesn't want to give up the Chinese market, with more than 300 million netizens on the mainland. On the other hand, it has said it does not want to subject its Web searches to what it considers censorship under Chinese law.