CHINA RESPONDED with a fiery broadside yesterday after US secretary of state Hillary Clinton attacked its record on internet freedom. It labelled Washington an “information imperialist” and said accusations that China was manipulating the internet for its own ends were false.
Web giant Google’s threat to leave China over cyber attacks on rights activists and internet censorship, combined with Mrs Clinton’s strong denunciation of censorship, have escalated the Google affair into a major row between Washington and Beijing.
The Chinese say the tension between the two superpowers is harming diplomatic ties, and Beijing officials told Mrs Clinton to “stop finger-pointing”.
“The US side had criticised China’s policies on internet administration, alluding that China restricts internet freedom. We firmly oppose such words and deeds, which are against the facts and harm China-US relations,” foreign ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said on the government’s website.
Many cyber-experts suspect that the hacker attacks from China on Google and other targets were so sophisticated that official involvement was likely.
The fact that human rights activists, journalists and dissidents were targeted also encouraged the suggestion that this might be the case. The internet row is the latest sign of strain between China and the US, already at loggerheads over trade issues, China’s currency and the sale of weapons by the US to Taiwan.
“We urge the US side to respect facts and stop using the so-called freedom of the internet to make unjustified accusations against China,” said Mr Ma’s statement.
In her speech in Washington, Mrs Clinton cited China as among a number of countries where there has been “a spike in threats to the free flow of information” over the past year. She also named Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam.
Mr Ma insisted the internet was open in China, with the most active development in the world. He said that by the end of last year there were 384 million webizens in China with 3.68 million websites and 180 million blogs.
However, claims the internet in China is free are somewhat undermined by the fact that the government heavily censors online activity and keeps a tight rein on the internet.
Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked in China, which uses a filtering system known as the “Great Firewall of China” to block any sites that have content which runs counter to the Communist Party’s interests.
The government said that this kind of censorship was in keeping with China’s “national conditions and cultural traditions”.
Both China and the US rely heavily on each other during this period of global economic slowdown, and this spat is unlikely to develop into anything significant. The Chinese government emphasised how the dispute should not be allowed to overwhelm co-operation with Barack Obama’s administration, which has sought Beijing’s backing on economic policy and diplomatic standoffs, such as Iran and North Korea.
Google made its ultimatum on January 12th after it uncovered a computer attack that tried to plunder its software coding and the e-mail accounts of human rights activists protesting at Chinese policies.
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said last week that the company hoped to find a way to maintain a presence in China but intended to stop censoring search results within “a reasonably short time”. In its defence China said that its laws ban hacking and that it was a leading target for cyber crime.