Some big Chinese news portals initially carried a short dispatch on Google’s announcement, but that account soon tumbled from the headlines, and later reports omitted Google’s references to “free speech” and “surveillance.”
The only government response came later in the day from Xinhua, the official news agency, which ran a brief item quoting an anonymous official who was “seeking more information on Google’s statement that it could quit China.”
Google linked its decision to sophisticated cyberattacks on its computer systems that it suspected originated in China and that were aimed, at least in part, at the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.
In a statement, the United States secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, expressed “serious concerns” about the infiltration of Google.
“We look to the Chinese government for an explanation,” Mrs. Clinton said.
Outside the company’s gleaming offices in Beijing, a trickle of young people laid floral bouquets and notes at the multicolored sign bearing the Google logo. As daylight faded, two 18-year-old law students approached with a bottle of rice liquor and lit two candles. One of the students said that she wanted to make a public gesture of support for Google, which steadily has lost market share to Baidu, a Chinese-run company that has close ties with the government.
“The government should give people the right to see what they want online,” said the woman, Bing, who withheld her full name for fear that it might cause her problems at school. “The government can’t always tell lies to the people.”
Since arriving in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what can be read online.
Google said the attacks took place last week and were directed at about 34 companies or entities, most of them in Silicon Valley in California, according to people with knowledge of Google’s investigation. The attackers may have penetrated elaborate computer security systems and obtained crucial corporate data and software source codes, though Google said it did not itself suffer losses of that kind.
While the scope of the hacking and the motivations and identities of the hackers remained uncertain, Google’s response amounted to an unambiguous repudiation of its five-year courtship of the Chinese market, which most major multinational companies consider crucial to growth. It is also likely to enrage the Chinese authorities, who deny that they censor the Internet and are accustomed to having major foreign companies adapt their practices to Chinese norms.
On Wednesday afternoon, the software maker Adobe Systems, announced that it, too, had endured a cyberattack. While it did not provide details about the assault, which took place earlier this month, the company said was investigating.
On Wall Street on Wednesday, Google’s shares were down about one percent, to $584.18.
If news of Google’s threat to quit China was largely muffled, there was some back-and-forth on message boards and a torrent of Twitter commentary — accessible only to those able to circumvent the Great Firewall.
“It’s not Google that’s withdrawing from China, it’s China that’s withdrawing from the world,” read one message.
While many comments mourned the prospect of Google’s departure, others, including Rao Jin, the founder of the Web forum Anti-CNN.com, expressed suspicion over the announcement.
Mr. Rao, known for defending China’s stances on issues like Tibet and Xinjiang against Western media criticism, said he thought Google made its decision under pressure from Mrs. Clinton, who met with Google’s chief executive last week as part of an effort to promote Internet freedom around the world.
“I think Google’s departure from Chinese market would be a big loss to Google, though not as big a loss to China because Baidu and other search engines are still rising,” Mr. Rao said in an interview. “Any company in China has to abide by Chinese rules, even though there are some times when the rules may not be not so reasonable.”
Hecaitou, a prominent blogger based in Beijing, also applauded the company’s announcement, although for different reasons. The possibility of Google leaving China, he said, would send a message to Chinese leaders intent on imposing greater restrictions online. Or at least he hoped it would.
“In the short term, the Internet environment will be very cold,” he said. “But for the government to close the door and revert to 30 years ago is hard to imagine. If they want to go forward on the information highway, they’ll have to listen to others.”
If Google does leave, it would be an unusual rebuke of China by one of the largest and most admired technology companies, which had for years coveted the country’s 300 million Web users. Google said it would try to negotiate a new arrangement to provide uncensored results on its search site, google.cn. But that is highly unlikely in a country that has the most sweeping Web filtering system in the world. Google said it would otherwise cease to run google.cn and would consider shutting its offices in China, where it employs about 700 people, many of them well-paid software engineers, and has an estimated $300 million a year in revenue.
