Not even Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder and the man reportedly driving this tough new stance with China, is sure how this story will play out.
As he told the New York Times, after two rounds of "back and forth" with the Chinese authorities, Google is still unclear how the Chinese will react .
"There's a lot of lack of clarity," he said, "Our hope is that the newly begun Hong Kong service will continue to be available in mainland China." Before adding: "The story's not over yet."
At the time of writing – midday on March 23 in Beijing – Chinese internet users were still able to access the re-routed search service on the Hong Kong page which carried a note in Chinese saying "Welcome to Google Search in China's new home."
However, searches from within China for sensitive topics, such as "Tiananmen Square Incident" were still blocked to internet users in mainland China thanks to the Great Firewall.
The question now being asked is whether the Chinese government will move to further punish Google by blocking the re-routed Google.cn site, at the cost of highlighting the extent of internet censorship in China to its own public.
The initial reaction from China's State Council Information Office was hostile, describing the decision to halt censoring as "totally wrong", apparently rendering flimsy Mr Brin's hopes (disingenuous or otherwise) that the Hong Kong search would be allowed to continue unmolested.
While some analysts see the Hong Kong strategy as a potentially elegant compromise to an apparently intractable dispute, others like Dr Mathew McDougall, CEO of SinoTech Group, one of China's leading online advertising agencies see an inevitable new round of confrontation ahead.
"It looks to us as if Google has thumbed its nose at China with this Hong Kong strategy. They've tried to be clever by exploiting a legal loophole, but that's surely going to anger the authorities.
"We're already taking bets in the office as to how long the Hong Kong-routed Google.cn stays open. My take is that the Chinese will close it down by the end of the day."
In practice, that will mean blocking the Google.cn domain name in China, so that Chinese internet users will simply receive a 'page not available' message when they attempt to log on to Google.
However, as Rebecca MacKinnon, Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre points out in her blog, such a move would only highlight the extent censorship in China .
"If they [the Chinese government] are smart they will just leave the situation as is and stop drawing media attention to their censorship practices," she writes.
"The longer this high profile fracas goes on, the greater Chinese Internet users awareness will be about the lengths to which their government goes to blinker their knowledge of the world." If China was to take that course of action, users would then have to wait and see what impact it would have on other Google services such as Gmail, Google maps and music downloads.
Many analysts believe that China, which has a history of backing down in the face of angry internet users, would not risk the wrath of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of users by blocking access to those services.
However at the moment nothing is impossible. The ball is now in China's court; as Sergey Brin so correctly observed, "The story's not over yet."
---By Peter Foster in Beijing
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