China issues flat-out denial on Google attacks

by Steve Ragan - Jan 25 2010, 09:00

In a statement that surprises absolutely no one, China said on Monday that they were not behind the attacks on Google and more than thirty other companies almost two weeks ago.

Not too long ago, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that an attack on one nation’s network can be an attack on all, and noted that countries that engage in cyberattacks “should face consequences and international condemnation.”

24-hours after Clinton made her remarks, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu commented that, “We urge the U.S. side to respect the facts, and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom issue to make groundless charges against China.”

Now, on Monday, China is once again denying all links to the attack with statements given during an interview on China’s state run news agency Xinhua. The “accusation that the Chinese government participated in any cyberattack, either in an explicit or inexplicit way is groundless and aims to denigrate China,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said.

The spokesperson added that China is firmly opposed to that, and went on to note that China itself was often the biggest victim of cybercrimes.

When it comes to the censorship issue, the spokesperson had this to say:

“The U.S. has criticized China's policies to administer the Internet and insinuated that China restricts Internet freedom...This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-U.S. relations.”

According to Google, the company has not yet halted the required censorship of their search results. At the same time, Google’s Eric Schmidt told various media outlets that they would be making those changes soon, but he didn’t list a timeline.

“We continue to follow their laws, [and] offer censored results. But in a reasonably short time from now we will be making some changes there,” Schmidt said to the AFP, regarding the halt to search censorship in China.

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