By AARON BACK
BEIJING—China fired back at U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over her speech on Internet freedom, saying her remarks about China were groundless and harmful to bilateral relations.

“We urge the U.S. side to respect the facts, and to stop using the so-called Internet freedom issue to make groundless charges against China,” Ma Zhaoxu, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Friday in a statement on the ministry’s Web site.

Mrs. Clinton’s speech on Thursday said the U.S. is making free access to the Internet a foreign-policy priority. While she criticized the kinds of methods frequently employed by China’s government to censor Web content, her specific remarks about China were limited and restrained. She said the U.S. and China “have different views” on the issue of Internet freedom, and that “we intend to address those differences candidly and consistently.”

Mrs. Clinton noted Google Inc.’s statement last week that it had suffered cyber attacks from China, reiterating that Washington expects China to investigate the charges.

“Countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Mrs. Clinton’s speech was closely watched by opponents of government censorship in China, which U.S. diplomats promoted in discussion sessions with Chinese bloggers Friday at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and at consulates in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Wen Yunchao, a Guangzhou-based blogger, on Twitter called the speech “a declaration of war from a free nation to an autarchy,” and compared it to Winston Churchill’s anti-Soviet speech decrying the Iron Curtain.

Chinese blogger Zhou Shuguang said in an interview, “The Clinton speech is for sure to have positive effect. It’s welcomed by China’s Internet users, especially the active ones on Twitter, regarding the censorship situation in China.”

Others were less impressed. Novelist and blogger Yang Hengjun said on Twitter the speech was positive but that Chinese Web users should not expect too much from it. “The U.S. government has been talking about supporting world-wide Internet freedom for ages, but it hasn’t done much yet.”

Some of China’s state-run media didn’t respond so positively to the speech. An editorial in the English-language edition of the Global Times said the U.S. push for free information “is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy.”

Mr. Ma’s statement dismissed assertions that China limits speech. “China’s Internet is open,” he said, adding that “promoting the development of the Internet has been our consistent policy.” He said China regulates the Internet in line with international practice but also in accordance with “China’s own national situation and traditional culture.”

Mr. Ma urged the U.S. to “properly handle differences and sensitive issues,” in order to maintain the healthy development of U.S.-China relations.

– Sky Canaves and Juliet Ye contributed to this article.

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