Society

Planned negotiations to end a copyright row between Google and a group of Chinese writers have been postponed, leaving a formal apology hanging in the air.

Erik Hartmann, Google Book’s top negotiator in China, called his counterpart Zhang Hongbo, deputy director of China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) around 10 am Tuesday morning and said Google wanted to postpone the negotiations due 2 pm that day.

“He (Erik) was friendly, but did not explain the exact reason, and we are communicating on when to restart the negotiation,” Zhang told China Daily via the phone.

Late Monday, Zhang told China Daily that CWWCS and Google planned to hold a press conference after the negotiations where they would make a formal apology.

Local authorities further lifted the ban on Internet service in Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region yesterday, allowing partial access to two of China's most popular websites following nearly six months of closure after the deadly July 5 riot in the capital, Xinjiang-based tianshannet.com.cn reported yesterday.

Residents in Xinjiang yesterday started to have access to two commercial websites: sina.com.cn and sohu.com.

"I am glad to see another two websites become accessible today. The government did keep its word of gradually resuming the Internet service," said Song Yingzong, a Urumqi resident in his 40's.

The two websites are among the nation's favorites for their e-mail accounts with large storage capacity as well as forum and blog sections. But users in Xinjiang could not enjoy such services that people in other regions take for granted because they still lack full access to the two websites.

China opposes the United States having official exchanges with Taiwan, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Tuesday.

Jiang made the remarks when asked to comment on Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou's Honduras tour with scheduled stopover in the United States.

Jiang said at a regular press briefing that China opposes the United States having any official exchanges and contact with Taiwan and this position remained clear and consistent.

Jiang said, "We demand that the United States abide by the principles laid out in the three Sino-US joint communiques and properly deal with the related issue with caution."

China's largest search engine, Baidu.com, confirmed that its website was paralyzed Tuesday morning after coming under a cyber-attack.

The search engine has now resumed operation.

"The reason why Chinese users could not log on to the website was that our domain name server (DNS) in the United States was illegally attacked," it said in a statement that gave no details of the attack.

The company said it was still investigating the problem, and declined to give further information.

Problems were found at around 8 a.m. The website reopened at 11:30 a.m..