No nation should have hegemony over internet: Xi Jinping

“The right for countries to participate in worldwide cyberspace governance as equals should be respected by all”.

The three-day conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, has gathered more than 2,000 heads of large technology firms and leaders from more than 120 countries and regions.

Mr. Xi’s remarks were delivered at an event attended by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Jack Ma, as well as executives from Google’s newly established parent company, Alphabet, and representatives from tech companies including Apple, Microsoft and IBM, along with Prime Ministers Dmitry Medvedev of Russian Federation and Karim Massimov of Kazakhstan. “This is an all-out assault on Internet freedoms”, said Roseann Rife, the East Asia research director at Amnesty International. “We should respect other countries’ rights to peaceful involvement in global cyberspace governance, including their choices of internet development, regulation and public policies”.

Xi said China wanted to see a “cyberspace anti-terrorism treaty”, and the formulation of “international cyberspace rules acceptable to all…”

On the sidelines of the conference, Robin Li, chief executive of Baidu, China’s largest search engine, admitted the decision on whether to display results for censored websites such as Facebook and Twitter on his company’s search engine was simply beyond its remit. “Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Thompson Reuters CEO James Clifton Smith reportedly are among the thousands of foreign guests attending”, The Hill notes.

The non-governmental organisation Reporters Without Borders continues to be encouraging authorities and foreign businesses because their presence, it says, makes them complicit in a censorship regime in which almost 40 journalists are in prison for work to avoid the summit.

At a key meeting earlier this year, the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) presented the concept of innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development. He particularly targeted the United States for monopolizing cyber governance while also using sophisticated technologies to conduct cyber espionage. “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. But he also called for “cyber sovereignty” with each country respecting the right of others to manage the internet according to their own priorities.

A separate Xinhua article directly attributed China’s growth to this system of censorship, which it described as “China’s constant resolution to uphold cyber-sovereignty”.

The President said Pakistan fully realized the potential of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) and was pursuing the vision of accelerated digitization to transform the country into a knowledge-based economy. “No engagement in tolerating or supporting internet activities that damage another country’s national security”, he said.