An article in the New York Times looks at the Chinese government’s reaction to Google’s decision last week to no longer censor its Chinese search engine:

Officials were caught off guard by Google’s move, and they want to avoid the issue’s becoming a referendum among Chinese liberals and foreign companies on the Chinese government’s Internet censorship policies, say people who have spoken to officials here. There have been no public attacks on Google from senior officials or formal editorials in the newspaper People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece.

Instead, most official statements and state media reports on Google’s surprise announcement that it intends to stop complying with Chinese censorship rules and might shut down its China operations criticized Google as trying to play politics and suggested that its business troubles in China were the real reason for the dispute.

“The Chinese government wants to handle the issue on a commercial level,” said Su Hao, a professor of Asia-Pacific studies at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.

Yet other Chinese responses politicize the incident by equating Google with the U.S. government. From the Financial Times:

Accusations in two newspapers that Washington was using Google as a foreign policy tool were echoed by Chinese government officials on Wednesday.

This comes before a policy speech by Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, on internet freedom on Wednesday, raising the risk that the standoff will damage already testy relations between the two major powers.

Global Times, a nationalist tabloid owned by People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, ran an editorial with the headline: “The world does not welcome the White House’s Google”.

“Whenever the US government demands it, Google can easily become a convenient tool for promoting the US government’s political will and values abroad. And actually the US government is willing to do so,” the piece said.

In an accompanying news story, the paper quoted Wu Xinbo, a political scientist at Fudan University, as saying “the Google incident is not just a commercial incident, it is a political incident”.

See also “China plays nationalism card in Google dispute” from Canada News.