Google recently seemed to suggest that it was willing to wait several millennia for its Chinese business to take off. As it plays its very long game, despite losing heavily to the local players and having to face down shareholder protests on human rights issues only last week, it, like other Western internet companies, is sticking to Beijing’s rules.

It is easy to explain why, but harder to believe that the explanation will last the long term. China’s attractions are plain. It already has about as many internet users as the US, the world’s largest online market. Yet, so far, the dragon is barely blowing smoke rings when it comes to e-commerce.

For although it may be true that being rich is indeed glorious, few of China’s 1.3 billion people have tested Deng Xiaoping’s dictum. Indeed, the average Chinese citizen has roughly the same chance of being hit by lightning as of becoming a dollar millionaire. Despite the prodigious rise of a new consumer class and the advance of the Shanghai stock market (up more than threefold this year), an estimated 200 million Chinese live on a dollar a day – about equal to the number who are online.

The three big American players – Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft – look at such figures and see the beginnings of a megamarket. None of them, however, is thriving in the Middle Kingdom.

The Eastern web is a tough nut. Ask eBay, which is being crushed there by Taobao, the domestic auction site owned by Alibaba, the company into which Yahoo! poured its struggling China business two years ago to avoid going it alone on the mainland.

The story is similar in the key online advertising market. The China-based Baidu.com leads in internet search, with nearly 60 per cent of the market, three times Google’s share.

Unperturbed, Google’s plan is to hunker down and keep Beijing sweet. “China is a nation with a 5,000-year history,” Eric Schmidt, the chief executive, said recently. “That could indicate the duration for our patience.” And so, Google (or “Gu Ge”) famously censors its Chinese search engine, so results for “Tiananmen Square”, for instance, do not mention the 1989 massacre (unless, for a while, at least, you misspelt “Tiananmen”). At its annual meeting last week, it defeated a call from shareholders who said that Google should not store data that could identify users in “internet-restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system”.

Across the sector, the bad China publicity keeps dripping like water torture. Last month, in the first case of its type, a Chinese political prisoner sued Yahoo! in a US federal court, alleging that it helped the Chinese Government to torture him by providing information that led to his arrest in 2002. (The Times Online article about the case was one of the ten most-read stories on the site in the week in which it appeared.)

Cisco Systems, Silicon Valley’s largest company and a supplier of hardware to the “Great Firewall” – China’s massive online censorship machine – experienced an investor revolt when 29 per cent of shareholders voted for a motion that demanded that it should report on how its products were being used to limit free speech.

In January F&C Asset Management, one of the dissident Cisco investors, issued a somewhat woolly “warning” to technology companies to get their acts together on how to deal with such incidents.

F&C missed a trick. It called for a common industry front but such a thing was summarised when Yahoo! recently said that it was “distressed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the internet”, but that it had to follow local laws.

The real question is this: How likely is it that Beijing will keep the same rules over the long term?

There is a growing sense that something will have to give as the party state ditches Marxism and finds its free-market feet. Increasingly, it is being suggested that the same circumstances that give China its massive potential are setting the scene for a radical social and political reorientation.

Cheap Chinese labour knocked a percentage point off US inflation last year, Wall Street analysts reckon. In his recent book, The Writing on the Wall, Will Hutton wrote that ordinary Chinese “do not know the numbers, but they live with the consequences”.

The fallout from China’s economic miracle includes a growing underclass of about 150 million migrant workers. Never mind a million-dollar fortune, many Chinese labourers – who are, after all, the consumers whom Google and its rivals wish to attract – would be happy with a fair contract, a weekend break and marginally safer factories.

Where Manchester’s worker dissidents of the early 1800s had the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley to urge them to “rise like lions after slumber”, China’s modern equivalents have World of Warcraft and dissident bloggers.

On a daily basis those modern firebrands are testing the integrity of the Great Firewall. Some of them, no doubt, would like to line Google, Yahoo!, Cisco and Microsoft up against that wall for their part in creating it.

If Mr Schmidt really is thinking about the very long term, he should not suppose that Beijing will be able to maintain its controls. The original Great Wall did not stop the barbarians it was built to block.

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