The chinese governement will have to change their policies at some point anyway.
Having the great firewall is as a side-effect hurting a lot the tech companies, no-one is actualy outsourcing tech to China. If you compare with India, the difference is massive. I can only think of one chinese tech company who succeeded internationally (AppAnnie), all the others I can think of are just copies of tech companies for the local market. At some point, they will have to choose between having great technology companies and keeping the firewall in place. The more they wait, the harder the choice is going to be for them.
I am pessimistic about this. The NSA fiasco hurts the interests of many American tech businesses, especially those operating a cloud, but you don't see any signs of US government changing their mind on surveillance. At least in the United States, money can influence politics. Yet the tech companies fail to change anything. In China, the power is inverted: politics control money. If censorship is good for the party but bad for business, then business just have to work with that.
China has amazing technology companies though, a fairly unique market when it comes to how the internet is used and a market that is so ridiculously large that any company just operating in China can do very well.
Just take a look at WeChat which is practically replacing the Web in China. They are clearly years ahead of Facebook.
The chinese government may have to change policies at some point but there is no reason to believe that this is something that has to happen anytime soon, certainly not within the next few years, probably not even within a decade.
Having the great firewall is as a side-effect hurting a lot the tech companies, no-one is actualy outsourcing tech to China. If you compare with India, the difference is massive. I can only think of one chinese tech company who succeeded internationally (AppAnnie), all the others I can think of are just copies of tech companies for the local market. At some point, they will have to choose between having great technology companies and keeping the firewall in place. The more they wait, the harder the choice is going to be for them.