By EDWARD WONG
BEIJING — The Chinese Foreign Ministry lashed out Friday against criticism of China in a speech on Internet censorship made by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, calling on the United States government “to respect the truth and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom question to level baseless accusations.”
Ma Zhaoxu, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in a written statement posted Friday afternoon on the ministry’s Web site that the criticism leveled by Mrs. Clinton on Thursday was “harmful to Sino-American relations.” “The Chinese Internet is open,” he said.
The statement by the Foreign Ministry, along with a scathing editorial in the English-language edition of The Global Times, a populist, patriotic newspaper, signaled that China was ready to wrestle politically with the United States in the debate over Internet censorship.
President Obama promised last year to start a more conciliatory era in United States-China relations, pushing human rights issues to the background, but the new criticism of China’s Internet censorship and rising tensions over currency valuation and Taiwan arms sales indicate that animus could flare in the months ahead.
Mrs. Clinton’s sweeping speech with its cold war undertones — likening the information curtain to the Iron Curtain — criticized several countries by name, including China, for Internet censorship. It was the first speech in which a top administration official offered a vision for making Internet freedom an integral part of foreign policy.
The debate over Internet censorship was brought to the fore in China last week when Google announced it might shut down its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, and curtail its other operations in mainland China if Chinese officials did not back down from requiring Google to censor search results.
Until now, the Chinese government had been trying to frame the dispute with Google as a commercial matter, perhaps because officials want to avoid having the dispute become a referendum on Internet censorship policies among Chinese liberals and foreign companies operating in China. On Thursday, He Yafei, a vice foreign minister, had said the Google dispute should not be “over-interpreted” or linked to the bilateral relationship with the United States, according to Xinhua, the official state news agency.
But in the aftermath of Mrs. Clinton’s speech, that attitude could be changing. Mrs. Clinton pointedly said that “a new information curtain is descending across much of the world” and identified China as one of a handful of countries that had stepped up Internet censorship in the past year. (Starting in late 2008, the Chinese government shut down thousands of Web sites under the pretext of an antipornography campaign.) She also praised American companies such as Google that are “making the issue of Internet and information freedom a greater consideration in their business decisions.”
The State Department had invited at least two prominent Chinese bloggers to travel to Washington for Mrs. Clinton’s speech, and on Friday the United States Embassy here invited bloggers, mostly liberals, to attend a briefing on Internet issues.
A White House spokesman, Bill Burton, said Friday that “all we are looking for from China are some answers.”
In its editorial, the English-language edition of The Global Times said Mrs. Clinton “had raised the stakes in Washington’s clash with Beijing over Internet freedom.” The American demand for an unfettered Internet was a form of “information imperialism,” the newspaper said, because less developed nations cannot possibly compete with Western countries in the arena of information flow.
“The U.S. campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted Internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy,” the newspaper said, adding that the “U.S. government’s ideological imposition is unacceptable and, for that reason, will not be allowed to succeed.”
Articles on the Chinese-language Web site of The Global Times asserted that the United States employs the Internet as a weapon to achieve worldwide hegemony.
One big question is whether ordinary Chinese will, to any large degree, accept China’s arguments justifying Internet censorship. Although urban, middle-class Chinese often support government policies on sovereignty issues such as Tibet or Taiwan, they generally deride media censorship. That feeling is especially pronounced among those who call themselves netizens.
China has the most Internet users of any country, some 384 million by official count, but also the most complex system of Internet censorship, nicknamed the Great Firewall.
Except in the western region of Xinjiang, which is only starting to restore Internet access after cutting service off entirely after ethnic riots in July, canny netizens across China use software to get over the Great Firewall while chafing at the controls.
Jonathan Ansfield and Xiyun Yang contributed reporting.
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