Chinese officials are ignoring Google’s demand that it be able to operate in China without censorship, The Times reported this morning.

Google mourned in China.

Google announced on 12 January that, in the wake of cyber attacks on both its own systems, and the computer systems of other large companies, and the emails of several human rights advocates, it would pull out of China if the country did not relax its censorship laws. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Jiang Yu, didn’t directly address Google’s ultimatum on Wednesday, but indirectly chastised the company, saying that all businesses operating in China need to abide by Chinese rules, The Times reported.

Google has continued to operate Google.cn today, the paper reported, and several critics have dismissed as grandstanding Google’s claim that it would pull out of China if it was forced to continue to abide by the country’s strict censorship regulations. Google, saddled with an unpronounceable name in Chinese, has made only a small dent in the search engine market in China, The Telegraph reported on Wednesday, capturing only a third compared to Chinese rival Baidu’s dominance.

Others, including people in China, are mourning the potential departure of the search engine giant from a nation that has been struggling with information freedom as its long global isolation comes to an end. Google has not released any new information on its official blog.

Multinational software giant, Microsoft, also confirmed today that it had no plans to pull out of China, “dashing hopes” that it would support its rival, The Telegraph reported today. When the news first broke that Google would pull out of China, The Telegraph opined that China couldn’t afford to ignore Google’s ultimatum – that corporations, not nations, had the power to set global policy and “shake the world.” But if Google stands alone, making an impact on China’s censorship policies could be incredibly difficult.

The US government has backed Google; the Obama Administration demanded an explanation for the attacks and said that they raised very serious concerns about freedom of speech in an increasingly global economy, The Telegraph.

Following Google’s announcement that its computer systems were attacked by Chinese-based hackers, other US-based companies, including software developer Adobe, revealed that they too had suffered an attack emanating from China. Search engine Yahoo!, which entered China several years ago, would not confirm or deny that it was a victim of a hack, but speculation was rampant that it too had been among the roughly 20 large businesses allegedly attacked, The Times reported.

The New York Times also noted that the revelation of these cyber attacks “lays bare the degree to which China and the United States are engaged in daily cyberbattles, a covert war of offense and defense on which America is already spending billions of dollars a year.”