BEIJING — Beijing’s most contentious symbol of globalization, a Starbucks outlet in the middle of the Forbidden City, is threatened with closure after an Internet campaign against it attracted thousands of supporters.

For six years, the Seattle-based coffee company has had a license to sell lattes and cappuccinos to the imperial palace’s 8 million visitors from the Emperor’s Hall of Attendance.

But a Web log by a popular business program host criticizing its presence as “trampling on Chinese culture” touched a sensitive nerve with the country’s huge and often nationalistic Internet community.

By yesterday, Rui Chenggang’s Web site had registered more than half a million hits and drawn thousands of supportive responses accusing the Forbidden City authorities of “selling out.”

Now, management at the Palace Museum — as the Forbidden City complex is formally known in Chinese — has been compelled to issue a statement saying it had put the outlet “under review.”

A spokesman, Feng Nai’en, said other shops and cafes had been closed as part of pre-Olympic Games renovations, and the future of the Starbucks franchise was also being considered.

“The museum is working with Starbucks to find a solution by this June in response to the protests,” he said. “Whether or not Starbucks remains depends on the entire design plan.”

Starbucks has outlets across China’s big cities and has said it wants China to be its second-biggest market. But ever since the Forbidden City branch opened in 2000, it has been celebrated and condemned as an example of communist China’s love-hate relationship with Western capitalism.

Tourist guidebooks routinely note the paradox that an American cultural icon should spring up not only inside a crowning glory of Chinese civilization but in what was for centuries the place where emperors did their best to shut out the outside world. The Forbidden City was so called because no commoners were allowed into the palace unless they were officials or concubines.

Soon after Starbucks opened, public complaints forced the branch to remove the trademark green sign in favor of the characters for Xing Ba Ke, its Chinese name, which now hang in the window. Yesterday, the company said it had “operated in a respectful manner that fits within the environment.”

“We have provided a welcome place of rest for thousands of tourists, both Chinese and foreign,” it said.

Mr. Rui said he had met the Starbucks chief executive, Jim Donald, at a summit at Yale University and had raised the issue with him personally.

Many international executives are astonished at the commercialization of the Forbidden City, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Mr. Rui said.

China’s Internet users, of whom there are 130 million, react strongly to any perceived slight to national pride. How powerful this sentiment truly is can be hard to judge with certainty.