China Unicom, China’s second largest carrier, announced they wouldn’t use Google’s search engine in Android smartphones. It will be the manufacturers of the smartphones who will decide which search engine to offer. Reportedly, for instance, Motorola is already adding BAIDU, China’s biggest internet search engine and is planning to pre-load Microsoft’s Bing search engine and maps service to its Chinese headsets.

It actually wouldn’t come as a great surprise to those of us who have been following the news about the tense relations between the Chinese government and Google since Google’s critical decision on January 12, 2010 to stop self-censorship in China on the grounds that their servers had been hacked for information about Chinese dissidents. After the negotiations to find the middle ground with the Chinese government resulted rather abortive, three days ago (March 22) Google started to redirect its censor-complying Google.cn search engine users to censor-free Google.com.hk (Google Hong Kong). Hence comes the current decision of China Unicom.

Considering the large and ever growing mobile phone market in China, this decision set many investors on alert and now the biggest concern is if the biggest carrier China Mobile will follow the same trend.