China Strangles Google Access, Users

China continues to pretend it isn’t strangling natural growth and internet access to its citizens; Google isn’t buying. When will China figure out that political doubletalk doesn’t equal partnership? A BBC story details the myopic projection of Chinese Internet policies as the world’s biggest Internet company threatens to walk.

China today released a statement announcing that “Internet firms are welcome to do business “according to the law”.

The statement, from Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, is Beijing’s first response to Google’s threat to stop filtering content in China.

Google said late on Tuesday that Chinese cyber-attacks aimed at human rights activists might force it to close its Chinese operations.

Ms Jiang said the internet was “open” in China.

Google announced that it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine – google.cn.

The search engine subsequently said it would hold talks with the government in the coming weeks to look at operating an unfiltered search engine within the law in the country, though no changes to filtering have yet been made.