8216;China will take time to cut Internet censorship8217;

8220;I think that openness increases steadily. Every time you open it the genie comes out of the bottle and it8217;s very difficult to put it back in the bottle,8221; he said.

Speaking on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum WEF annual meeting in Davos,Switzerland,he said: 8220;The Internet has a tradition of bit by bit increasing openness.

8220;It tends not to go backwards8230;a government that is used to working with an uninformed citizenry might take a while to move to a position where the citizens are informed.

8220;So I can imagine that China might need to move carefully in that direction,but I think we should do everything we can to make it easier for a government which censors the Internet to move in that direction.8221;

The comments come after Google,responding to cyber attacks on the email accounts of Chinese human rights activists,said it can no longer censor Web search results in China 8212; even if that means it has to leave the country.