Google is going on the offensive again regarding China, accusing the government of interfering with its Gmail service. Apparently, China is conducting a sophisticated attack making it look like Gmail itself isn't functioning properly rather than being disrupted.

Google has said that there are no issues on its part, the service is operating as it should and any problems are strictly China's doing.

"Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail," Google told The Guardian.

It seems that China is taking pro-active steps in disrupting any attempts at social unrest, following the situation in the Middle East. After the uprisings in many Middle East and North Africa countries, some in China started inciting for a similar Jasmine Revolution.

Already, tens of activists have been arrested, apparently, in direct relation to this new movement. To prevent further issues, China is said to be disrupting Gmail.

Users are able to log in and see the landing page, but have trouble sending new messages, marking emails as read and so on. It's unclear how widespread the issues are.

Google says that reports of problems started coming in about a month ago, right about the time when a Jasmine Revolution began to get some support in China.

One way the government may be interfering is by using an Internet Explorer vulnerability. Last week, Google said it noticed attacks mainly against activists.

"We’ve noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target. We’ve also seen attacks against users of another popular social site," several members of Google's Security Team wrote last week.

"The abuse of this vulnerability is also interesting because it represents a new quality in the exploitation of web-level vulnerabilities. To date, similar attacks focused on directly compromising users' systems, as opposed to leveraging vulnerabilities to interact with web services," they explained.