US Internet powerhouse Google Inc on Thursday said it was investigating reports that Chinese Web surfers had been blocked from Google.com amid a reported censorship crackdown.
The comments came two days after Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said users in many major Chinese cities had been having trouble connecting to the uncensored international version of Google for the past week.
"We have heard reports that users in China are experiencing problems accessing Google.com," a spokesman for the California-based company said. "We are investigating this matter."
The company has come under fire for launching in January a censored Chinese-language site called Google.cn, which remains available in China while the international Google.com appears to be blocked. Google.cn is censored according to the wishes of China's propaganda chiefs.
"Google has just definitively joined the club of Western companies that comply with online censorship in China," a Reporters Without Borders statement said on Wednesday.
"It is deplorable that Chinese Internet users are forced to wage a technological war against censorship in order to access banned content," the group said.
The broadside came Google co-founder Sergey Brin said on Tuesday during a visit to Capitol Hill that the company's decision to allow politically sensitive information to be filtered from its Chinese Web searches had compromised Google's principles and said it may rethink the move.
But the company said it is committed to doing business in China despite criticism the company has faced for abiding by Chinese government censorship restrictions, Brin said.
He reiterated Google's intention to move ahead with its google.cn site -- a version that censors thousands of sites according to Chinese standards -- as well as its global google.com site.
Brin told a small group of invited journalists: "I think it's perfectly reasonable to do something different. Say, OK, let's stand by the principle against censorship and we won't actually operate there."
But he then added: "That's an alternative path. It's not the one we've chosen to take right now."
"We sort of committed to try out this path and we are still actually trying to get it to work," Brin said.
A Google spokeswoman said the company had no further comment on Brin's remarks.
Brin said users in China have two options -- slower speed search which is uncensored at google.com, or faster search, with limits set by Chinese authorities at google.cn.
"If you are a normal Chinese user and you want to use Google, just go to google.com and you actually won't get good service," Brin said. "Eventually you will go to google.cn."
At a regular news briefing in Beijing on Thursday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao (
"Any trade and commercial cooperation should be carried out within the framework of laws. We hope the relevant companies, when undertaking business operations, can abide by Chinese laws and regulations," Liu said.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has