The Chinese government came out swinging yesterday against allegations the cyber attacks that led Google to threaten to pull out of the world's most populous nation originated in one of China's top universities and at a little-known vocational school with suspected links to the military.

"Reports that these (attacks) came from Chinese schools are groundless, and accusations of Chinese government involvement are irresponsible and out of ulterior motives," a Foreign Affairs spokesman told reporters.

Qin Gang said China has laws against hacking that are strictly enforced.His words came as reports leaked out that Google is preparing to resume talks about its future with Beijing, which were interrupted for the lunar new year holiday.

Since Google announced in January that hackers it believed were based in China breached its defences, the company has been trying to determine whether it is possible to stop complying with Chinese Internet censorship rules and still continue to operate its popular Google.cn search engine in the country.

The California-based Internet giant's attempts to deal with the hacking controversy quietly were hijacked on the weekend when the New York Times published new "evidence" further implicating China. Citing "people involved in the investigation" of the online attacks against Google and about 30 U.S. companies, the Times said Shanghai's Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province appeared to have been involved. London's Financial Times followed with more revelations, claiming a Chinese programmer in his 30s wrote at least part of the script that was used to target a hole in Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

It claimed U.S. analysts have identified him as a freelance security consultant who posted his work on a "hacking forum." Both schools identified by the Times have denied any knowledge of or connection to the sophisticated hackers.

Jiaotong, which is one of China's elite universities, has a strong computer science department and proudly boasts of professors who have worked with the People's Liberation Army (PLA).Lanxiang, on the other hand, is little-known, even in China, and claims its students are nowhere near advanced enough to carry out anything close to the kind of attack that Google suffered.

"The reports are too boring, simply unfounded and politically orientated," Li Zixiang, Communist party chief at Lanxiang School told the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua. The Times claimed that Lanxiang's dean and chief professor have both worked on "technology matters" for the PLA. The Chinese-language Internet does not appear to be preoccupied with whomever is responsible for the attack on Google, but it is enjoying the idea that the New York Times has blamed Lanxiang School.