"We are all here in China that represents quite a lot of opportunities, not only on the business side, but also on the social side," Yang said.

"We look at our users' interests, without our users we don't have business."

At the same time, it was essential that Yahoo employees abide by local laws as well, he added.

"I would not put our employees at risk in anyway, shape or form and when it comes to issues such as seeking user information we have a very clear cut set of rules."

"The government of any country has engaged with us through legal documentation or legal procedures, we get a lot of those every day around the world."

On the heels of Yahoo helping China bust journalist Shi Tao, Jerry Yang is in China taking part in the Internet Summit being thrown by Alibaba. Who thinks they would have been welcome there if they didn't hand over the information? I don't.. And I'm not just talking about the summit.

Bill Clinton is also attending.

"In China, I think that so far the political system and restraint on political speech in the Internet has not seemed to have any adverse commercial consequences," Clinton said.

"It will be interesting to see whether that is true of the future.

"In America, the Internet is this wild cauldron of dissenting voices, we have now whole different media over the Internet with all the blog sites in America," he said.

Clinton nails it. Its all about the market. Its the Chinese internal market that must put the pressure on the Chinese government. An internal approach is better than an external one. In China's eyes, any pressure from outside to change their approach to speech would be seen in a light akin to terrorism. The Chinese citizens need to be the ones to fly the Internet into Beijing. To stretch the analogy for all its worth, the pilots cannot be Chinese trained in America for their actions to take hold in the society. It must come from within. They can do it based on our ideology, but lets not be so blatant about it as to put it in the context of a state based attack. Put your faith in freedom and people. In this case, the Chinese people.

The next person standing in front of a tank will be holding a laptop with Wifi.