But with more than 200 million Internet users, China represents a market Google cannot overlook.

"It's an important growth region for them," said Fetyko. "So they can't just ignore it and walk away from it."

The Chinese government has not acknowledged whether it had a hand in the recent Google service outages. Google said it is investigating the incidents but would not comment on whether it has had any contact with Chinese authorities.

Anti-Porn Drive?

Beijing's criticism of Google comes as the government steps up a campaign against Internet pornography, but it isn't clear why the search engine has been singled out by Chinese officials.

China has required all PC makers pre-install special "Green Dam" software to filter out objectionable material like online pornography. Critics, including US Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and US Trade Representative Ron Kir, say the software can also be used to enforce broader censorship.

Last week, Beijing ordered Google to block overseas sites with "pornographic" or "vulgar" content from being accessible through the Chinese language version of its search engine.

Google said it met with Chinese government officials and was taking necessary steps to ensure that the search results on its Chinese language site complied.

That pragmatic approach is common among US Internet companies doing business in China. On Thursday, Yahoo Inc CEO Carol Bartz answered a question about Chinese censorship at the company's annual shareholder meeting by saying that Yahoo was not created to "fix China."

"We have worked better, harder and faster than most companies to respect human rights and try to make a difference," said Bartz. "But it's not our job to fix the Chinese government."

... contd.