Google: ‘The people will win over the Chinese government’ and break censorship

Expressing his opinion during a talk hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that China’s strict monitoring of the Internet would eventually decline due to the increasing number of Chinese consumers going online and expressing themselves.

"Ultimately, the people will win over the government. The yearning is so strong," he said.

Chinese government continues censoring Google searches even after a strong controversy that happened between the Internet company and Beijing. At the moment there are about 420 million Internet users in China, as reported by the national government, but Chinese users cannot access certain websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. In addition, the government invests heavily into the web policing, using a large organization of regulators that are estimated to number from 30,000 to 50,000, Schmidt said.

Still, the sheer number of Chinese people using the Internet in coming years will push such monitoring past its limits, he added. Currently, the country has more than 800 million mobile phone users, many of whom are starting to use their handsets to go online.

"The question is at what point will there be so many Chinese people online that such mechanisms break down in terms of censorship and so forth?" he said. "If you think about the scale, they've got a billion phones that are trying to express themselves. It will be difficult in my view to completely keep up with that."