Free speech and internet are key to China’s reform, says Google’s Eric Schmidt
The world’s No 2 economy will stall unless its people can speak freely, Eric Schmidt says
Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Monday urged Beijing to allow its people to think and speak freely if the world’s No 2 economy wants to grow further.
In an interview with the South China Morning Post, the search engine giant's chief spoke of his concern at the mainland’s recent “500 reposts” rule designed to tighten the government’s control of the Internet.
Schmidt, who is visiting Hong Kong as part of a partnership program with the Chinese University of Hong Kong to help grow young entrepreneurs in the city, told the Post that freedom of speech will help the mainland to avoid falling into the so-called “middle-income trap”.
“Google believes very strongly in a free internet. The mainland just passed the law about the 500-reposts thing. Then you will definitely think about it before you write. It’s a problem, (it) means your voice is not fully heard,” said Schmidt.
“My opinion is China wants to avoid the middle-income trap and in order to avoid that, they have to develop the openness, free speech, and the reason is in order to get there, you should have the debates about everything,” he added.
In his latest speech last week about the mainland’s economic growth, Chinese President Xi Jinping said he was confident that China would see healthy economic growth and would not fall into a middle-income trap, according to the official Xinhua news agency. The middle-income trap often happens when a country moves from low income to middle income, but find it more difficult to grow further to reach the high-income rank. This can be a stage where social problems occur. South Africa and Brazil are two often cited examples for this typical economic development trap.
“I have a strong opinion and my opinion is there should be freedom of speech to pursue one’s goals for ideas. Our position hasn’t changed,” said Schmidt, adding that restrictions on mainland Internet access, which makes Google’s search and email services unstable, would also hurt the mainland’s academic research.