Chris Buckley
Sun
China defended its curbs on the Internet and attacked U.S. criticisms of its policies on Monday – Photograph by: Reuters, Reuters
China widened its attack against U.S. criticisms of Internet censorship on Monday, raising the stakes in a dispute that has put Google in the middle of a political quarrel between the two global powers.
China has defended its curbs on the Internet nearly two weeks after the world’s biggest search engine provider, Google Inc., threatened to shut down its Chinese Google.cnsite after a severe hacking attack from within China.
The dispute could narrow room for Beijing and Washington to back down quietly and focus on other disputes such as trade, currency, human rights and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan.
“The more this case takes on high-level political import for the Chinese government, the more likely it is to stick to its guns,” said David Wolf, president of Wolf Group Asia, an advisory firm covering Chinese media and telecommunications.
“The Chinese government can’t be seen as backing down on such a fundamental issue,” said Wolf.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week urged China and other authoritarian nations to pull down Internet censorship, prompting scathing commentary in Chinese papers.
The White House backed Google, while China accuses Washington of using the Internet for its own aims.
“This year, we’re seeing problems over trade, the Dalai Lama, and U.S. weapons sales to Taiwan coming to the surface,” said Jin Canrong, an international relations expert at Renmin University.
“The politicization and ideological turn of the Google case could make it more difficult to work together. The basic need for cooperation, economically and diplomatically, hasn’t changed, but each of these issues could disrupt cooperation from day to day.”
In coming months, U.S. President Barack Obama may meet the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled Buddhist leader who Beijing considers a separatist. Washington has also unveiled arms sales to Taiwan, the self-ruled island Beijing regards as a renegade province.
In Riyadh, the CEO of Cisco Systems Inc, John Chambers, told reporters he was optimistic that Google’s dispute in China would be resolved through “give and take”. Chinese Human Rights Defenders said its website and four other activist sites were hit by denial of service attacks on Jan 23-24. It called the Chinese government the most likely culprit.
China‘s State Council Information Office said the nation “bans using the Internet to subvert state power and wreck national unity, to incite ethnic hatred and division, to promote cults and to distribute content that is pornographic, salacious, violent or terrorist”.
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