Google has announced it will stop censoring search results in China after discovering that hackers have been targeting the company’s Gmail system in order to access the email accounts of Chinese human rights campaigners.

The company revealed its new approach to China in a post on the company’s blog last night. It claims that while investigating a series of sophisticated cyber attacks “we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of US-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third party”

The company whose “don’t be evil” motto was called into question by their 2006 decision to censor local results in order to run a limited China-based search engine. Google claim they launched Google.cn “in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results.”

However, in the face of sophisticated cyber attacks and the Chinese government’s increasing efforts to limit free speech on the web Google have announced that unless they are able to run an unfiltered search operation they will consider pulling out of their Chinese operations.