https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-30/google-leave-australia-what-to-learn-from-china-legislation-law/13102112
Google pulled its service from China more than a decade ago
Dr Min Jiang, professor of communication studies at the University of North Carolina, told the ABC that although Google pulled its search services, the company still actually existed in China courtesy of an AI research center it opened in Beijing in 2017.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/why-google-quit-china-and-why-its-heading-back/424482/
Why Google Quit China—and Why It’s Heading Back
When American Internet companies do business abroad, they are sometimes forced to do a repressive government’s dirty work.
When Google shut down its Chinese search engine in 2010, it gave up access to an enormous market. There are more than twice as many people on the Internet in China as there are residents in the U.S., and the number of Chinese Internet users is growing at a rate that far surpasses that of any other country. Google has plans to return to China in the near future, but why did it turn away from the country for so long?
Censorship is why. Google effectively shut down its Chinese operations after it discovered a cyberattack from within the country that targeted it and dozens of other companies. And while investigating the attack, Google found that the Gmail accounts of a number of Chinese human-rights activists had been hacked.