Google hopes China changes policies

Google hopes its threat to withdraw from China will put pressure on China’s government to change its policies, the company’s CEO said Friday.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said Google hopes China’s censorship of the Internet will change, and that Google hopes it can apply some pressure “to make things better for the Chinese people.”

Schmidt spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The company earlier this month threatened to pull out of China and announced it would no longer censor the results of its search engine findings in China. It did so after reporting that hackers had attacked it from with China in an effort to access the accounts of Chinese human-rights activists.

The attack has prompted criticism of China from the Obama administration and members of Congress.

Schmidt said Google likes the growth it sees in China, but not the censorship.

William Reinsch, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, said Google’s fight with China could be a sign of things to come.

He cited other policies China has imposed to protect local companies, particularly innovative companies in the tech sector. Those policies could ultimately hurt China, he indicated, because U.S., European and Japanese companies could shift their investments to other fast-growing developing countries such as Brazil or India.