SHANGHAI – Google said Friday that its license to operate in China had been renewed, a surprise announcement that ended weeks of speculation over whether the Internet giant would be forced to abandon the world’s single largest market of online users.

The renewal had been in doubt in recent days, as the existing license expired and Google, in what was considered a last-minute effort at compromise, decided to stop automatically redirecting Chinese users to its sister site in Hong Kong.

Additional Photos

Eric Schmidt, second from left, CEO of Google, Kaifu Lee, left, then vice president of Google China, and Johnny Chou, then president of Google China, unveil the Chinese-language Google brand name at a news conference in Beijing in April 2006. The Associated Press

There was no confirmation of the renewal Friday night from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which was handling the matter. There was also no mention of the renewal by any of the Chinese state-owned news sites that normally run breaking stories.

Earlier Friday, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt hinted that a renewal was coming, telling an annual high-tech gathering in Sun Valley, Idaho, “We now expect to get a renewal.”

The standoff between Google and China — which came to be framed as an issue of free speech online versus the Beijing government’s insistence on strict censorship and control — began in January, when Google said its server had been hacked and some e-mail addresses compromised.

At the time, Google said it would no longer self-censor its local Chinese search site, Google.cn. The standoff became an additional irritant in the often-tense relationship between Washington and Beijing.

In March, Google began automatically redirecting its Chinese users to its companion site in Hong Kong, the former British colony that operates under a system of limited autonomy and does not practice censorship.

But last week, with its license to operate in China set to expire, Google announced that it was no longer automatically sending its Chinese users to the Hong Kong site. In what was seen by industry experts as a compromise to appease China, users going to Google.cn instead received a page that allowed them to go to the Hong Kong site by clicking on a link if they wished.

Google actually draws only about a third or less of the Internet search engine traffic in China, and its Chinese search business accounts for just a small slice of the company’s overall revenue. Far more Chinese users use the local site Baidu.

But loss of its license to operate an Internet site would have potentially locked Google out of the Chinese market for its other services — particularly the far more important mobile phone business.

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