Confusion reigns in Google/China standoff

Google has now retracted statements made earlier this week that websites unable to be accessed from Google.com.hk were the result of technical problems. It appears that the search engine giant once again believes that China is attempting to block access to certain webpages for Chinese surfers.

Last month Google made good on its threat to stop censoring search results on Google.cn after it was revealed that malicious attacks had been made against the Google and several other companies.

Google started redirecting traffic from Google.cn to Google.com.hk, an unfiltered search engine in retaliation for the breach. Last week, when certain sites appeared unavailable to websurfers in mainland China, many suspected that the Chinese government had taken steps to continue its censorship policy.

Google however announced that it suspected that the access problems were in fact a glitch that they were taking steps to fix.

Now however, Google has announced that the access problems were in fact caused by China’s ‘great firewall’ Internet censorship filters, not by a glitch caused by programmers at Google.

China recently issued directives to news outlets in China instructing them to conform to the state authorised interpretation of events and warning them against broadcasting any material which may bring the party line into question.