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The official newspaper of the Chinese communist party has accused Google of intentionally blocking access to its website by displaying an allegedly unnecessary malware warning telling its visitors that the site might contain malicious software, shortly after the newspaper published an article against Google’s practice of scanning books for its online repository sometimes without the author’s explicit consent.

The accusations by the Chinese media are just the latest bit of negative publicity Google has been receiving over the course of the last few months from Chinese authorities, after it was criticized for allowing pornographic links to appear in its search results and for not fully respecting copyright law when scanning books to display on what has become one of the most popular services offered by the search giant.

Google representatives replied to the censorship accusations calling them “wrong and without merit,” explaining that the search giant regularly scans the Web pages in its index and has very high accuracy algorithms for detecting malware coming from a site, displaying warning messages when a possible threat is detected regardless of the website’s actual content.

The malware, the Google representatives went on explaining, can sometimes be placed on a website without the knowledge of the site owner, and Google removes the malware warning as soon as it detects that the threat has been neutralized successfully and the website is safe again.

The People’s Daily said its “online book” section was blocked from Google searches via a malware warning for three days, beginning last Wednesday, and asserts the blockage was “malicious revenge” for featuring stories about how Google’s practice of scanning books without permission violates the rights of Chinese authors. According to the newspaper, the block came despite the site’s security technicians said they found nothing wrong with the site.

Considering the strict online censorship practiced by the Chinese communist regime, the newspaper’s statement is not without a comical component. Just the day before the accusations, the newspaper reported that the Chinese government had banned over a thousand work of “lewd” online literature for offenses such as using provocative titles to draw attention and blatantly talking about one-night stands, and said the administration would soon write new laws and regulations on publishing literature online.

Despite Google is trying to respect Chinese regulations in its localized version — including removing pornographic links and results for search terms such as “democracy,” “human rights” or “dictatorship” — to secure a good stake in the world’s largest population of Internet surfers, the search giant keeps losing ground to the more popular Baidu search engine.