Google mourned in China.

Months after the search engine giant protested China’s strict censorship policies, Google made good on its threat to stop censoring search results by re-routing its Chinese search engine through uncensored servers in Hong Kong. China responded today by restricting mainlander users access to the Hong Kong site; reported The New York Times, “Beijing officials were clearly angered by Google’s decision, which focused global attention on the government’s censorship policies, and there were signs of possible escalation in the dispute.”

Google’s decision that it can no longer operate under the yoke of censorship didn’t square with its desire to kept a toehold in China’s burgeoning Internet search market; as The New York Times pointed out, shifting operations to the island was Google’s attempt to have it both ways.

The company admitted as much on its blog, writing: “Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on Google.cn has been hard. We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced—it’s entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.”

So far, it doesn’t appear to have worked: The Chinese government has blocked some access to the Hong Kong site, including to YouTube and blogs. Google is facing even more far reaching reprisals from the government, which has tremendous influence over other elements of the Chinese telecom industry. Already, China’s largest cellular communications company is expected to back out a deal with Google that would have placed the search engine on its mobile Internet homepage under government pressure. Meanwhile, Google has created a monitoring site so that the rest of the world can watch the Chinese government’s reaction, effectively shifting the debate into the realm of public shaming.

The Telegraph reported today that while some analysts saw the Hong Kong strategy “as a potentially elegant compromise to an apparently intractable dispute”, others saw it as Google “thumbing its nose at China.” Shane Richmond, head of technology at The Telegraph, also questions Google’s motives – ostensibly, un-censoring their results is about freedom of access and about responding to several cyber attacks that supposedly came from China. “Google has come to the right decision in pulling out of China,” he wrote today. “However, its reason for doing so seems trivial compared to the human rights abuses it ignored to be there in the first place. It leaves me wondering whether there is more to this decision than we know.”