It took Chinese officials less than two hours to react on Google’s announcement to stop censoring their services in China. Google, two hours before the response, started to redirect their China mainland traffic to the company’s Hong Kong domain serving unfiltered information and services to Chinese users.
The official in charge of the Internet bureau under the State Council Information Office told Xinhuanet.com that Google had “violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks”.
The official added that Google’s move was totally wrong, and that China opposed the politicization of commercial issues and expressed discontent to “Google for its unreasonable accusations and conducts”.
Google had been in talks with Chinese officials before to resolve the issue without having to pull out of China completely. The current move can be seen as a compromise between pulling out completely and continuing to censor search results and other services in China.
The official did not reveal China’s reaction to Google’s move. It is likely that additional Google services will be blocked in China. Google has created a Google China Service Availability information page where users from all over the world can see which Google services are blocked in China. The page however has not been updated since March 21.
Update: Google has integrated information about the availability of its services in China on the company’s Transparency Report website.
It lists all regions in which services are disrupted. Currently, five services are listed as blocked in China including Gmail, Google Search and Google Sites.
The data is updated regularly by Google. The product that has been banned the longest in China at this time is YouTube with 2185 days followed by Picasa Web Albums with 2070 days and Google Sites with 1983 days.