[7] In January 2010, Google announced that, in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on them and other US tech companies, they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely if necessary.

[12][13][14] At the time, Hong Kong was vested with independent judicial power[15] and was not subject to most Chinese laws,[16] including those requiring the restriction of free flow of information and censorship of Internet traffic.

Initial reports suggested that the error was caused by a banned string (RFA, as in "Radio Free Asia") being automatically added to Google search queries upstream of user queries, with prominent China journalists disagreeing over whether the blockage was an intentional and high-level attempt to censor search results.

[20] In 2013 Google stopped displaying warning messages that had shown up for mainland Chinese users who were attempting to search for politically sensitive phrases.

[21] Google's Internet mail service, Gmail, and Chrome and Google-based search inquiries have not been available to mainland China users since 2014.

[35] On 1 August 2018, The Intercept reported that Google plans to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, code-named Dragonfly.

[36] On 6 August, China Communist Party's official newspaper People's Daily published a column which was soon deleted saying that they might welcome a return of Google if it plays by Beijing's strict rules for media oversight.

[44] In December 2018, The Intercept reported that the Dragonfly project had "effectively been shut down" after a clash within Google, led by members of the company's privacy team.

Google argued that it could play a role more useful to the cause of free speech by participating in China's IT industry than by refusing to comply and being denied admission to the mainland Chinese market.

[54] A US PBS analysis reported clear differences between results returned for controversial keywords by the censored and uncensored search engines.

[59] In early 2008 Guo Quan, a university professor who had been dismissed after having founded a democratic opposition party, announced plans to sue Yahoo!

Experts claimed the aim of the attacks was to gain information on weapon systems, political dissidents, and valuable source code that powers software applications.

[62] Additionally, dozens of Gmail accounts in China, Europe, and the United States had been regularly accessed by third parties, by way of phishing or malware on the users' computers rather than a security breach at Google.

Although Google did not explicitly accuse the Chinese government of the breach, it said it was no longer willing to censor results on google.cn, and that it would discuss over the next few weeks "the basis on which we could run an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.

[63][64] On 13 January 2010, the news agency AHN reported that the U.S. Congress planned to investigate Google's allegations that the Chinese government used the company's service to spy on human rights activists.

[65] In a major speech by the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, analogies were drawn between the Berlin Wall and the free and unfree Internet.

[66] Chinese articles came back saying that the United States uses the internet as a means to create worldwide hegemony based on Western values.

[67] The issue of Google's changed policy toward China was cited as a potentially major development in world affairs, marking a split between authoritarian socialism and the Western model of free capitalism and Internet access.

[70] The Chinese People's Daily newspaper published an op-ed on Google which criticized western leaders for politicizing the way in which China controls citizens' access to the Internet, saying "implementing monitoring according to a country's national context is what any government has to do", and that China's need to censor the internet is greater than that of developed countries, "The Chinese society has generally less information bearing capacity than developed countries such as the U.S. ..."[71] While Jiang Yu, a spokesperson of China's Foreign Ministry, promoted the Chinese government's "development of the internet", Wang Chen of China's State Council Information Office defended online censorship: "Maintaining the safe operation of the Internet and the secure flow of information is a fundamental requirement for guaranteeing state security and people's fundamental interests, promoting economic development and cultural prosperity and maintaining a harmonious and stable society.

[73] By criticizing cultural export (in this case, the localization of Google in China), it provided defense to justify the Chinese authorities' censorship control.

[73] The Chinese authorities were accused of steering state-run media to bundle Google together with other disputes with United States that had been stirring nationalist rancour in China at the time.

Since 27 May 2014, Google's various services have been suspected of having been subject to malicious interference from the Great Firewall of China, as a result of which users became unable to access them.