CHINESE authorities are taking on Google as part of increased efforts to "clean up" the country's internet and stifle online dissent, a day after US officials urged Beijing to abandon plans for controversial filtering software on new computers.
Both English and Chinese-language versions of the web search engine were briefly inaccessible in China on Wednesday and its Gmail e-mail service was inaccessible from some university campuses, following days of argument after China accused Google
of spreading pornography among its citizens.
"According to complaints from many residents, Google's English-language search engine has spread vulgar content that is lascivious and pornographic, seriously violating China's relevant laws and regulations," foreign affairs ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.
Though he did not directly comment on the Google disruption, Mr Qin warned that Google China "should strictly abide by Chinese laws and regulations."
With just less than 100 days to go before the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China, authorities are retaining blocks on some popular blogs and web forums, and ordering computer manufacturers to distribute its intrusive "Green Dam" filtering software with all new computers from 1 July. In Beijing, an army of 10,000 volunteers is to police internet use and report "unhealthy" content.
US commerce secretary Gary Locke called on Beijing to revoke the Green Dam order, warning it "poses a serious barrier to trade".
"China is putting companies in an untenable position by requiring them to pre-install software that appears to have broad-based censorship implications and network security issues," Mr Locke said.
"The US and China are waging a war over the internet, a war of information. It's a new Cold War," said Li Xiguang, dean of the journalism school at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, who said China's insistence on the Green Dam software just as protests were breaking out in Iran was likely not coincidental, and Google, as a major US company, was a logical target.
"(Chinese internet companies] say probably the internet is being used as a weapon by the US like it is in Iran," Mr Li said. "(For China] it could be worse than the nuclear weapons used by the North Korean people."
China encourages internet use for education and business, and has the largest population of net users at 298 million. But the government runs the world's most extensive web monitoring and filtering system.
Human-rights groups warn the new measures, along with the arrest of prominent Chinese dissident Lu Xiaobo this week, amount to a new kind of tug-of-war for control between a government trying to stifle an avenue of dissent, and cyber- citizens accustomed to freely expressing themselves online.
That tussle has already led to threats that efforts at censorship will meet with sabotage, according to a Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens published yesterday on an English-language blog, The Shanghaiist.
"It is now clear as day: what you want is the complete control and censorship of the internet. We hereby declare that we, the Anonymous Netizens, are going to launch our attack worldwide on your censorship system starting on 1 July, 2009."
