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Internet giant Google says it has been forced to stop redirecting users of its China search engine to its unrestricted Hong Kong site.
Bosses had chosen to use the tactic to bypass Chinese censorship regulations and generate an unfiltered page of search results.
Chinese firewalls did manage to filter the results for users based in the country, but the communist government was nevertheless unhappy.
Its regulators told the company its internet licence, which expires on Wednesday, would not be renewed if it continued to use the Hong Kong redirect.
On a company blog, Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said: 'It's clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable.
'Without an ICP license, we can't operate a commercial website like Google.cn - so Google would effectively go dark in China.'
Mr Drummond said Google had decided to send all Chinese users to a different landing page with a link to the Hong Kong site for search purposes.
However, Google.cn will still provide unfiltered services like music and text translations.
'This approach ensures we stay true to our commitment not to censor our results on Google.cn and gives users access to all of our services from one page,' he said.
It is not clear whether Google's solution will be acceptable to Chinese authorities, who block websites with references to a wide range of subjects deemed taboo, from democracy to pornography.
Hong Kong, meanwhile, is a Chinese territory, but has Western-style civil liberties and no internet filtering.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said he could not comment on Google's latest approach, but added: 'I would like to stress that the Chinese government encourages foreign enterprises to operate in China according to law.'
Google announced in January that it no longer wished to comply with Chinese internet filtering but wanted to continue operating services other than searching.
