China insists Google complies with law

Thursday 14th January 2010

Google must comply with Chinese laws on internet censorship if it is to maintain operations in the country, Beijing said in its first response to the search engine's claim it could pull out.

The search engine giant revealed in a blog post this week that it was considering ending its Chinese operations following attempts to hack Chinese human rights activists' Gmail accounts.

Google's presence in China has always been contentious, with its "Don't be evil" corporate motto seeming at odds with an agreement to censor details on the Tiananmen Square Massacre and Falun Gong among others from its Chinese search results.

China's foreign ministry said on Thursday that Google, along with other foreign internet firms, was welcome to do business there, but only if it complied with national regulations.

"China like other countries administers the internet according to law," said spokeswoman Jiang Yu.

"China's internet is open and the Chinese government encourages development of the internet."

If Google pushes ahead with threats to end its operations in China, up to 700 jobs are likely to go.

China has more internet users - 350 million - than any other country in the world, with its search engine market dominated by Baidu.com.

Google did not explicitly blame Beijing for the "highly sophisticated and targeted attack" upon its corporate infrastructure in China and the Gmail accounts of human rights advocates.

Google insisted only account information and not emails themselves had been accessed.

David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer, said the search engine giant had taken the unusual step of disclosing the attacks because the information went to the "heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech".

Google agreed to self-censorship at the Chinese government's request when it launched Google.cn in January 2006, arguing that the benefits of increased access to information outweighed its "discomfort" in agreeing to censor some results, Mr Drummond wrote.

"These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered - combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web - have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China," he said.

"We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognise that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China."

Kate Allen, Amnesty International UK director, welcomed Google's commitment to its stated business principles and said it "lays down the gauntlet" to over internet companies operating in China.

"It's also interesting that an apparent attempt to target human rights defenders influenced Google's decision. Anyone who stands up for human rights faces persecution in China, as we saw at Christmas when Liu Xiaobo was jailed for eleven years after his 'Charter 08' document called for reform," she said.

"Internet repression continues unabated in China. Search results are filtered and sites are blocked or closed down. People are still in jail for what they have written online.

"The Chinese authorities must release the stranglehold it has on China's internet users and grant them the same rights to freedom of speech and information as web users in any other country. And it must stop the systematic persecution of people who stand up for human rights."

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