After two moths of tussle with Beijing over censorship and alleged hacking into its system, the search engine giant Google closed out its Chinese website and and shifted its base to uncensored Hong-Kong, late on March 22 night. However, those who were rerouted to Hong Kong are still unable to access sensitive websites because the Chinese filters block all the content reaching mainland.

“The Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement,” wrote David Drummond, chief legal officer of Google on his blog. “We are well aware it could at any time block access to our services,” he added.

The daring act of ceasing its operations in the world’s third largest economy, and the biggest online market with almost 384 million netizens, left a big question mark on the Google’s future operations in China.

According to the NYT, china’s biggest cellular communications company, China Mobile, is also likely to cancel its deal to use Google search on its mobile internet home page. Following its footsteps is the China Unicom, the second largest cell phone operator, which will also drop the search function from new phones using Google’s Android mobile operating system.

Now whether the Google’s R&D and Advertising operations with almost 600 employees in Beijing will thrive or not is yet to be seen.

“You sort of make China look like the bad guy and you think you’re going to be selling Google phones? Good luck,” Colin Gillis, analyst for BGC Financial, told Reuters.

Beijing reacted quickly to Google’s announcement calling it ‘totally wrong’ and saying it “violated the written promise”, Google made when entering the China four years ago, assuring to self-censor its online services to conform to the Chinese law. In a recently launched campaign, the Chinese state media has accused Google of trying to export western culture in china.

Thereafter, spokesman for the foreign ministry Qin Gang said that Google fallout would not hamper Sino-US relations, unless some people try to politicise it.

Hong Kong-based expert on Chinese Internet, Rebecca MacKinnon, wrote on her blog, “the ball is now in the Chinese government’s court.”

She said it would be smarter of the Chinese government to leave the situation as it is and stop putting their censorship practices in media glare. She noted that the more this high-profile battle stretches, the greater will be the Chinese Netizens’ awareness about the extent to which their government goes to narrow their knowledge of the world. Chinese government believes its citizens require strict censorship. Earlier, you tube was blocked in 2008 after the Tibet riots. Last year it blocked Facebook and Twitter after Xinjiang riots in July 2009.

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The government of China, on Monday, denied any association with internet attacks and defended its internet censorship, after the US urged Beijing to investigate accusations of cyber trespassing. This dispute has added tension to the bilateral relations.

“China’s policy against internet hacking attacks is transparent and consistent”, stated the ministry of industry and IT, around two weeks after the search giant Google Inc. warned to pull out of china after discovering that the emails of activists had been interfered with.

“Any accusation that the Chinese government participated in cyber attacks, either in an explicit or indirect way, is groundless and aims to discredit China” said an anonymous ministry spokesperson. “We are firmly opposed to that.”

China’s cabinet and the state council, defended the nation’s internet regulation and said that its legal and that other parties should not intrude in Beijing’s reports affairs.

The remark came after the Google threatened to pull out of china unless the government eases censorship laws. The final warning came after Google stated it had exposed a computer attack that tried to plunder its software coding and the email ids of human rights activists protesting Chinese policies.

Although Google attributes the attacks on its system to hackers in china, but hasn’t directly alleged Chinese government or its agents.

Questioning the Google’s allegations that its servers had been attacked by hackers based in china, a Chinese internet security official said that the search giant had yet not reported its complaints to the China National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team.

“We have been hoping that Google will contact us so that we could have details on this issue and provide them help if necessary,” said Zhou Yonglin, the team’s deputy chief of operations.

He also said that majority of cyber attacks on Chinese servers originates from the US, witch hackers infecting systems with malicious software like Torjans, which that enables outside access to the target’s computer system. During last year, nearly 262,000 IPs in China were infected by Trojans planted by approximately 165,000 overseas Ips. Nearly 16.6 percent of these attacks were from the US IPs.

China was the biggest victim of internet attacks. Last year more than 42,000 websites were hacked, while 18 million computers per month were attacked by the conficker worm virus, that slow-down computers and steal personal information.

A week earlier, the US secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized nations involved in internet censorship and pleaded China to look into computer attacks against Google. In a recent speech, Clinton
mentioned China as one of those nations where there had been “a spike in threats to the free flow of information” over last one year.

Chinese Foreign ministry, on the other hand, accused the united states for straining the relations between the countries. A Chinese newspaper even said that Washington was trying to impose ‘information imperialism’ on china. Internet control is a crucial matter of state security, and Beijing shall not offer any sort of concession in the discord with Google.

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