Speaking to an audience including prime ministers and business executives, Xi, who also heads China’s central Internet security and informatization leading group, reiterated that the new frontier of the Internet, though highly global, “is by no means a land beyond law”.
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The Second World Internet Conference, the most high-profile Internet related event in China, is taking place in the picturesque water town of Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, Dec 16 to 18.
Popular social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, for example, are blocked in the country, with a pilot free-trade zone active in Shanghai in the past which allows access to such content, although still heavily restricted.
The BBC’s John Sudworth is at the conference, and explains why.
The state is also known to pay armies of people, known colloquially as the “50 Cent Party”, to post pro-government messages and drown out negative commentary on bulletin boards and in the comments sections of news articles. At the first such gathering previous year, efforts to issues a declaration broke down after some from the global technology community balked at language calling on them to “respect Internet sovereignty of all countries” and “widely spread positive energy”.
The speech was the latest of example of Xi’s efforts to elevate Internet policy to a top-level concern. “We should respect other countries’ rights to peaceful involvement in worldwide cyberspace governance, including their choices of internet development, regulation and public policies”. Xi however said that there is a need for a balance between “order” and freedom of expression. “We should encourage countries to develop their own Internet services suitable for their own environments”, Zhao said.
Xi said China wanted to see a “cyberspace anti-terrorism treaty”, and the formulation of “international cyberspace rules acceptable to all…”
“Under the guise of sovereignty and security, the Chinese authorities are trying to rewrite the rules of the Internet so censorship and surveillance become the norm everywhere”.
Earlier this year, China led Russian Federation and some of the same Central Asia governments in proposing the United Nations adopt an internet “code of conduct” that would effectively give every government a veto over technical protocols interlinking the global internet.
China attached great importance to internet development, Xi said.
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China has an estimated 670 million Internet users-one-fifth of the world’s total-making it ideal target for a wide range of cybercrimes including data theft and illegal gambling. “We can not just have the security of one or some countries while leaving the rest insecure; still less should one seek the so-called absolute security for oneself at the expense of the security of others”, he said.
