China has dismissed allegations made in a leaked U.S. diplomatic cablethat one of its most senior leaders ordered a hacker attack on Internetgiant Google after he found negative references to himself using thesearch engine.
"It is ridiculous and not worth mentioning," foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday.
"We hope [this] will not affect bilateral ties with the United States," she said.
Thecyber attack was traced back to locations in China, prompted Google toclose its China-based search service in March, and was targeted at thee-mail accounts of Chinese rights activists, Google said at the time.
Amongthe diplomatic cables obtained by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeakswas one in which an unidentified Chinese contact said the attack wasorchestrated by two Chinese Communist Party Politburo members.
Thecable quoted the Chinese source as saying the operation was ordered bypropaganda czar and fifth-most powerful leader Li Changchun, with theassistance of top law enforcement official Zhou Yongkang, according toa report in the New York Times.
Google has so far declined tocomment on the WikiLeaks cable. A request for comment made to thecompany's office in Beijing went unanswered on Monday.
Calls to China's Ministry of Information Industry also went unanswered during office hours on Monday.
Leaks translated
Hangzhou-basedrights activist and blogger Zan Aizong said that no one in China hadbeen able to access Google services in the country immediately afterthe attack.
"After this happened, you couldn't find any negative news about Li Changchun anywhere on Google," Zan said.
"Butnetizens still managed to find it, using circumvention tools to getpast the Great Firewall," he said, referring to a complex system ofblocks, filters, and censorship mechanisms employed by the Chinesegovernment to control what its citizens can see online.
"Either that or they can use Twitter...to post information about Li Changchun," said Zan.
He cited as an example reports that the cutting-edge Southern Metropolis News receivedseveral hundred directives each year from Li's central propagandadepartment banning coverage of "sensitive" news items.
Volunteershave been busy translating the cables into Chinese on the WikiLeakssite, which has been blocked in China for about two years, netizenssaid.
"We are simply translating them, with no regard for our opinion about them," said one volunteer editor on the WikiLeaks site.
"Wejust translate whatever is written there. The cables that have beenpublished on the site so far haven't mentioned Li Changchun," he said.
"Thatcame from some overseas reports," he said, referring to a number ofU.S. and U.K.-based newspapers that were fed some of the cablesexclusively by WikiLeaks.
Unreliable figures
However,a 2007 cable released on the site this week quoted vice-premier LiKeqiang as saying that China's GDP figures were "man-made" andtherefore unreliable.
U.S.-based economist Ding Li said there isa lot of current interest in research into how China arrives at itseconomic forecasts.
"There is one person in our researchinstitute who goes to China every year to spend time in the NationalBureau of Statistics ...The people there told him that the GDP figuresare basically made up," Ding said.
"Actually, a lot of overseas academics have doubted Chinese figures for a long time now."
XieTian, professor of management at the University of South Carolina, saidcurrent measures are failing to give a clear view of how China'seconomy really works.
"If the basic figures [underlying thecalculation] are problematic, then that has unimaginable implicationsfor the whole of Chinese society," Xie said.
WikiLeaks started publishing last weekend what it said were more than 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, some of them about China.
Thesite's founder, Julian Assange, was arrested in London on Tuesday inconnection with sexual assault allegations arising from a trip toSweden in August 2010.
Reported by Xin Yu and Shi Shan forRFA's Mandarin service, and by Fung Yat-yiu for RFA's Cantoneseservice. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.