The United States will soon give China a formal diplomatic note expressing concern about cyber attacks that prompted Google Inc to threaten to pull out of China, the U.S. State Department said on Friday.

We will be issuing a formal demarche to the Chinese government in Beijing on this issue in the coming days, probably early next week, U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters.

It will express our concern for this incident and request information from China as to an explanation of how it happened and what they plan to do about it, the spokesman added.

Google Inc announced on Tuesday it is no longer willing to continue censoring Internet search results in China, and that it may shut down the google.cn website and close its offices in the country.

In its statement, Google said that in mid-December it detected a sophisticated and targeted attack on its corporate infrastructure originating from China that led to the theft of intellectual property from the company.

It also said it had evidence suggesting that one of the main goals of the attackers was to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

(Editing by Philip Barbara)

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