The Internet disruptions that Asian users faced this week are an indication of a long altercation between China and the Internet search giant.

A day after Google’s Monday announcement that China had apparently blocked mainland users from accessing its Hong Kong site for the time being, Internet hackers Tuesday hit Vietnamese-speaking computer users, probably to muffle disapproval of a contentious Chinese-backed mining project in Vietnam.

In addition, fresh attacks were also supposedly unleashed against foreign journalists - covering China and Taiwan – who reported the hacking of their Yahoo e-mail accounts.

The new rounds of hacking attacks have come amid growing concern over the response of the Chinese authorities to Google’s decision to shutter its search operations in the country and redirect traffic to a Hong Kong-based uncensored site.

While Google has refrained from commenting on the origin of the malware attack on Vietnamese computer users, analysts are of the opinion that the episodes indicate that China is unaffected by global criticism of its censorship policy and may continue hampering Web traffic.

Noting that Google might lose “future growth” potential in China, stock analyst Clayton Moran, of the Benchmark Co., said that despite being the biggest Internet market by users, China “is still immature from a monetization standpoint” – with Google’s online advertising business in the country comprising merely about 1 percent of its total revenue.