"We are indeed in active discussions with the Chinese government but we are not going to engage in a running commentary about those conversations," Google China spokeswoman Marsha Wang told AFP.

"We've been very clear that we are no longer going to self-censor our search results."

The comments came after a top Google executive told US lawmakers Wednesday that the company was prepared to leave China, the world's biggest online market, if it was forced to continue censoring its web search engine.

"Google is firm in its decision that it will stop censoring our search results for China," Google vice president and deputy general counsel Nicole Wong told the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

"If the option is that we'll shutter our .cn operation and leave the country, we are prepared to do that," she said at a hearing on the relationship between Internet technology and aiding democratic activists around the world.

In response to Wong's testimony, Chinese state media quoted academics as saying that Google "should be no exception" in China's campaign to clean up the Internet.

Xinhua quoted Chen Zhonglin, a delegate at the current session of the National People's Congress in Beijing, saying that all countries had the right to scrutinise the Internet to protect the state and its citizens.

"Restrictions on the Internet may be different among countries, but the specifics should be decided by a country itself," Xinhua quoted Chen, dean of the Law School of Chongqing University, as saying.

"From a legal point of view, Google, as a search engine, should be responsible for its search results," Chen told Xinhua.

Feng Fei, a researcher at the Development Research Center of the State Council, was quoted as saying that China was "not alone in the world in exercising rights of Internet supervision."

"China's supervision is not targeted at Google or any other foreign company," Feng said. "Actually, whether Google leaves or not, there will be little impact on China."

Google threatened in January to leave China over what it said were cyberattacks aimed at its source code and at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists around the world.

Google has since continued to filter results on its Chinese language search engine, Google.cn, and posted ads for dozens of positions in China, which has the world's largest number of Internet users at 384 million.

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