With currency values, trade imbalances, and US weapons sales to Taiwan already being a few of the contentious issues hurting the US-China relations, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu has said that the Thursday speech by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, against online censorship, might serve yet another blow to the relations between two big economies.

In her speech, Clinton criticized China’s cyber policies, and virtually raised the ‘Internet freedom’ facet to the level of a key human rights agenda in the US. She urged China to probe into the cyber attacks against Google and other companies, and to publicly reveal the findings of the probe.

Saying that “A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” Clinton drew a parallel between China’s escalating Internet censorship and the Berlin Wall – both of which, she said, flout global commitments to free expression.

Terming Clinton’s comments as “damaging,” a statement on China’s Foreign Ministry Web site, www. mfa. gov. cn, read thus: “We urge the US side to respect facts and stop using the so-called freedom of the Internet to make unjustified accusations against China.”

Noting that the US condemnation of China’s Internet-related policies clearly implicated that China is restricting Internet freedom, Ma Zhaoxu said that such an insinuation is not only “contrary to the facts,” but is also “harmful” for the China-US relations.