China moved to block access to Google's Hong Kong site, The New York Times reported Tuesday, after the Internet giant began redirecting tens of millions of Chinese users to its uncensored server in the former British colony.
Google and China have been at odds for two months after the company said it would pull out part of its service if it had to keep censoring search engine results as required by Chinese law.
On Monday, visitors to Google's old service for China, Google.cn, discovered they were being redirected to the Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong, which is semi-autonomous and has greater freedoms. Google does not censor searches there.
This prompted a furious reaction from China Tuesday.
"Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks," the official Xinhua News Agency quoted an official in a statement issued just hours after Google's announcement.
"This is totally wrong. We're uncompromisingly opposed to the politicization of commercial issues, and express our discontent and indignation to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conducts," the unnamed official added.
According to the New York Times, "Chinese users on Tuesday could not see the uncensored Hong Kong content because government computers either blocked the content or filtered links to searches for objectionable content before it reached them."
Google's China urls and www.google.com.cn are now automatically redirected to www.google.com.hk.
Sensitive subjects censored
AnNBC correspondent in Beijing reported that sensitive topics were unavailable despite Google's Hong Kong redirect.
For example, searching for "Hu Jintao," the president's name, "Falun Gong," the name of a semi-religious sect frowned upon by the Chinese government, or "June 4th", the day of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in Google's Hong Kong site resulted in a message saying, "Internet Explorer can not display the Web page."
Google's Gmail e-mail service remained accessible from within China, as did its news page, though attempts to call up specific articles on China were blocked.
Google's Hong Kong page had heralded the shift Monday. "Welcome to Google Search in China's new home," it said. The site also began displaying search results in the simplified Chinese characters used in mainland China.
It was not clear whether Google notified regulators in advance about the switch to the Hong Kong service.
Degree of autonomy
Although Hong Kong is part of China, it was granted a degree of autonomy when it was returned to Chinese rule by the U.K. 13 years ago.
Its legal and political freedoms were largely preserved. That has made Hong Kong an appealing home base for companies operating in mainland China, which in turn has troubled Beijing, said Nicholas Bequelin, Human Rights Watch's senior Asia researcher.
"China may also read this as a challenge to its sovereignty of Hong Kong," Bequelin said. Google's move "is probably going to put the heat on the Hong Kong authorities, (whose) leadership is handpicked by Beijing."
In 2006, when it opened operations in Beijing, Google tried to better reach Web users in China by setting up Google.cn, which returned tailored search results. That meant complying with rules requiring the omission of search results the government deemed subversive or pornographic. Google's pages for China noted that some results had been excluded. But the complicity sparked widespread criticism among Google supporters, including some of its own employees, who believed the company was violating its "Don't Be Evil" motto.
The Chinese government uses filters to restrict the links that can be clicked by mainland audiences. It has completely shut off YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. China has an estimated 350 million Internet users.
Hacking attacks prompted dispute
On Jan. 12, Google vowed to shake loose from government-imposed restraints on the Internet.
It said it was no longer comfortable playing by the rules after it said it had determined that Google and more than 20 other U.S. companies had been targeted in computer hacking attacks originating from China.
The attackers tried to pry into the e-mail of human rights activists, according to Google. That raised the specter that the Chinese government or its agents played a role in the espionage, although Google never made a direct accusation to that effect.
Even so, Google had hoped to persuade the Chinese government to let it run a search engine that could deliver unrestricted results. Failing that, Google wanted to find enough common ground to maintain its research center and sales team in the country.
"Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard," David Drummond, Google's top lawyer, wrote in a Monday blog posting. "We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement."
The withdrawal of its search engine makes Google the latest foreign Internet company to founder in the heavily regulated China market. Companies such as Yahoo, EBay and Microsoft's MSN instant messaging service have never gained the traction in the China market that their homegrown rivals do. (Msnbc.com is a joint Microsoft - NBC Universal venture.)
Move might dismay tech-savvy Chinese
Google's move is likely to further dismay many younger Internet-literate Chinese, who admired the company's fight against censorship even though they don't like to be reminded of the government's heavy hand. In the days after Google first announced a possible pull-out, some Chinese placed flowers outside Google's Beijing office building.
In anticipation of Google's move, Chinese state media cranked up the criticism of Google in recent days in a coordinated assault apparently aimed at swaying public opinion against the U.S. search engine giant as it debated exiting China.
Recent commentaries carried by both Xinhua and the China Daily newspaper accused Google of harboring a political agenda and said the company should understand that it has to comply with the laws of countries where it does business.
"Business is business. But when it involves political tricks, business will come to an end soon," the China Daily wrote.
Beijing encourages Internet use for education and business but blocks access to other material, including Web sites abroad run by human rights and pro-democracy activists. The actions to keep China's citizens from finding politically sensitive information and images online have been dubbed the "Great Firewall."
U.S. officials express disappointment
A spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, Mike Hammer, expressed disappointment that Google and China weren't able to work out their differences.
"The U.S.-China relationship is mature enough to sustain differences and while we seek to expand cooperation on issues of mutual interest with China, we will candidly and frankly address areas of disagreement," Hammer said.
But many analysts believed China didn't want to lose Google completely, possibly because it might be interpreted as a setback in the government's efforts to foster innovation.
For its part, Google wanted to stay in China so it could keep hiring computer programmers and peddling ads in the country. Google also believes its presence in China could lead to looser rules on censorship.
Small fraction of Google's revenues
China accounted for a small fraction of Google's $24 billion in annual revenue. Analysts estimate Google brought in $250 million to $600 million from China. It's unclear how much of that amount flowed exclusively from Google.cn.
But investment analysts have worried about the long-term consequences of Google's actions in China. Opportunities there figure to grow faster than in the U.S. or Europe. Even if Google remained a distant second in search behind the homegrown Baidu.com Inc. in China, Google could still prosper as more Internet ads are served up in the country.
Google shares have slipped 5 percent since its Jan. 12 warning about a possible shutdown in China.
China's financial promise is the main reason other technology companies, including Microsoft, seem intent on staying in China. If Google exited the country completely, Microsoft and other technology companies might have had an easier time recruiting China's best engineers.
The director of the China Internet Project at the University of California, Berkeley, applauded Google for its stand but predicted China will make it difficult for the company to continue doing business in China.
"The Chinese government will respond in their typically heavy-handed way," said Xiao Qiang, director of the project. "It's inevitable."
This report contains information from the New York Times, as well as reporting by Associated Press writer Alexa Olesen and NBC contributer Bo Gu.