Google Chairman urges China to Reform Free Speech and the Internet

During a visit to the Chinese University of Hong Kong to encourage entrepreneurship in youth, Google executive chairman has Eric Schmidt called on China to open up Internet access and voiced concern at its latest crackdown on online freedoms. He stated his strong opinion that there should be freedom of speech to pursue one's goals for ideas. He said China would need to open up in order to grow and criticised the Chinese government’s new law against which could mean prison sentences for authors of messages deemed ‘defamatory’ by the government that are re-posted 500 times. He noted that Google believes very strongly in a free Internet and, people self-censoring themselves to avoid risk in problem, because it means their voices are not fully heard.

The Google CEO spoke with the media in several interviews and gave his outlook on China’s future. He mentioned that the forces of demographics, globalization and automation have favoured China up until now, and the economy will eventually stall unless its people can speak freely. He said that in order for China to avoid the middle income trap, openness and free speech are key reforms. The middle income trap is the result when a country’s wealth increases, but has difficult moving reaching the ranks of high-income nations. Often, serious social problems arise at this stage, and South Africa and Brazil are prominent examples of countries that have fallen into this trap. An official from the Xinhua news agency reported that President Xi Jinping was confident that China will see healthy economic growth and not fall into the middle income trap. Schmidt urged China to adopt modern rules for the internet and free speech, as openness of technology will build a modern country of ideas, research, innovation, and ultimately, prosperity.

Schmidt also confirmed that as a result of China's Internet censorship, Google has no current plans to expand there. The company abandoned its Chinese-language search engine in mainland China transferred it to Hong Kong in 2011. In his opinion, China's censorship regime has gotten significantly worse since Google left, so something would have to change before the company goes back.