Xi said China fully backed the drawing up of an global treaty on cyber-counterterrorism and was opposed to the cyber-arms race, which has seen countries use the internet to carry out espionage and disrupt other states’ communications.
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Lu Wei, head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, defended China’s policies at a briefing on the conference earlier this month.
The WIC witnessed the signing of a series of cooperation deals between Chinese and overseas tech companies.
“Cyberspace should not be a battlefield for countries to wrestle with one another”, the Chinese president said.
“No country should pursue cyber hegemony, interfere in other nation’s internal affairs, or engage in, connive at or support cyber activities that undermine the national security of other countries”, he added.
Beijing has additionally been accused of launching cyberattacks towards corporations and governments in recent times.
Worldwide communities have also realized the importance of a complete cyberspace governance system and held many meetings and forums this year, including the 10th IGF forum in November that have solicited a variety of public opinions on how to govern the Internet better to keep its sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development.
“Cyberspace is similar to the real world in that both freedom and order are necessary”. “This is an all-out assault on Internet freedoms”.
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. “It covers all aspects of state-to-state relations, which also includes cyberspace” and he encouraged the worldwide Internet community to respect each other’s sovereignty. China’s e-commerce sector is booming, Alibaba alone brought in $14.3 billion in total sales volume during China’s shopping holiday, “Singles Day” which is up 60% from last year’s total, which was $9.3 billion.
He described current management of the web as “unbalanced”, with information gaps between different countries, and said “the current rules in cyberspace can’t reflect the wishes and interests of majority of countries”. Human rights group Amnesty Worldwide issued a press release calling on know-how corporations to reject what it calls Beijing’s efforts “to affect global Web governance in ways in which would curb freedom of expression and exacerbate human rights abuses”.
Yet while authorities typically couch their Internet controls in the language of national security, critics call the concept a thinly-veiled excuse for stifling dissent.
Robin Li, chief executive officer of Baidu Inc, China’s largest online search company, said he is betting on the future of artificial intelligence.
He particularly targeted the United States for monopolizing cyber governance while also using sophisticated technologies to conduct cyber espionage.
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Representatives from dozens of countries attended the Wuzhen conference – Malawi, Barbados, Iran, Laos, Sudan and Afghanistan among them – many of which look to China as a major trading partner.
