The mainland's leading search engine, Baidu, appeared to have been hacked again yesterday amid the row over internet freedom between Beijing and Washington.
The result of the apparent hacking attempt was an influx of links to pornographic websites - the target of a government crackdown that many critics say is an excuse to rein in internet freedom on the mainland.
A Baidu publicity employee said yesterday the firm had received several complaints about the malfunction, but he declined to comment whether it was the work of hackers.
'We are handling this issue now and we can't confirm if this is a hacking incident,' said the employee, who refused to be named.
Pornographic websites have been a target of the mainland's Great Fire Wall censorship, which mainly blocks politically sensitive content. However, many net users can still log on to lewd websites. For several hours yesterday, some searches yielded a whole page of links with gibberish Chinese characters on the second page of the search. The first page appeared normal.
Most of the links led to dead ends but a few were connected to pornographic websites.