14 DAY TRIAL // Things are heating up between China and Google now that the US government has more or less gotten involved. While China has stayed quiet and diplomatic so far, urged by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's speech on Internet freedom in which she specifically called out China, officials in the country are going on the offensive and now claim that the government had nothing to do with the attacks on Google and that asserting that it did further threatens the already fragile relations between the two countries. In two separate interviews, Chinese state officials denied any involvement of the government in the attacks and defended China's stance on Internet freedom.
"The 'accusation that the Chinese government participated in (any) cyberattack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way, is groundless and aims to denigrate China,' an unnamed spokesman for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology told Xinhua. 'We are firmly opposed to that,' the spokesman said. 'China's policy on Internet safety is transparent and consistent,' he added, reiterating that the country was itself the 'biggest victim' of hacking," AFP reports.
A couple of weeks ago, Google came out with what turned out to be quite a controversial statement, saying that it will stop censoring search results in the Chinese version of the site, Google.cn. This decision came after a sophisticated and highly targeted attack on the company's infrastructure carried out by Chinese hackers. While Google didn't specifically say that the Chinese government was involved, which would be very hard to prove anyway, the tone of the post implied that the hackers were linked to the authorities.
Things got worse last week when the US government more or less got involved, albeit indirectly, urging a critical response from China. Google and Chinese officials are in talks over the future of the search engine and the company's operations in the country. The fate of the search engine looks sealed, neither parties are backing down from their positions leaving just one option, shutting down the site. However, Google may be able to keep the rest of its businesses in China, taking advantage of the 1,000 or so workforce it employs there. If things precipitate though, as they seem to be, it could mean a much less favorable outcome for Google.