China Criticizes The Times for Article on Premier's Family Fortune HONG KONG - A spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry on Friday criticized a decision by The New York Times to publish a lengthy investigation into assets accumulated by the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, saying that the article "smears China and has ulterior motives." Speaking at a regularly scheduled daily briefing in Beijing, the spokesman, Hong Lei, also said that the Chinese government's decision to immediately block access to the English- and Chinese-language Web sites of The Times on Friday morning was taken "in accordance with laws and rules." China's censors also moved with unusual swiftness on Friday to delete any social media postings alluding even tangentially to the article, which cited publicly available corporate documents in reporting that Mr. Wen's family has controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion. Sina Weibo, a very popular microblogging service similar to Twitter and traded on the Nasdaq in New York, on Friday morning immediately deleted the unofficial account that had been used to promote the culture and arts coverage on the Chinese-language site of The Times and that had nearly 60,000 followers. The site's official account had been blocked since the site began operations in late June. Even the term "$2.7 billion" was blocked on Friday on Weibo. But users were still discussing the article by using deliberate mistakes like "2.7b." Despite the censorship, there were signs that the article was attracting attention. According to the company's statistics, the number of page views and unique users of the Chinese-language site fell by only a third on Friday compared with the previous Friday, even though 85 percent of users are typically located in mainland China. The investigative article was the site's most popular, drawing nearly a third of page views, while the home page drew another third. The continued strength of traffic to the site was a sign that many users were using virtual private networks, or V.P.N."s, to effectively bypass servers in China and circumvent the country's censors. "We are incredibly proud of the story, which is an example of the quality investigative journalism The Times is known for," Eileen Murphy, a company spokeswoman, said in an e-mail, later adding that the company remains very focused on global expansion and that "we see great opportunity in China as we do in other countries around the world with growing economies and a citizenship interested in quality journalism about global affairs." There were many comments about the article on social media sites outside China, including some suggesting that such a detailed and comprehensive look at a leading family's finances in a secretive country like China could have been possible only as a result of a deliberate leak by one of Mr. Wen's rivals in the country's factional power struggles. Those struggles appear to have become more fierce in recent months ahead of the Communist Party Congress, which is scheduled to start on Nov. 8 and is expected to produce a new slate of leaders to run China for the next 10 years. But the reporter who wrote the article, David Barboza, said that he had begun gathering corporate records for the investigation late last year. "Thirty years of economic reform - and government policies aimed at attracting foreign investment - have created a set of government agencies that keep records on private corporations and their major shareholders, including copies of résumés and government-issued identity cards," he said. While China has started restricting access this year to some of these documents in Beijing, they were previously publicly available, and Mr. Barboza said that he had gathered many of them before the restrictions were put in place. He also found that documents still remained available in Tianjin - Mr. Wen's hometown - as well as in Shanghai, Shenzhen and other cities.