Every country should govern its own Internet: China’s Xi

“The impact of China’s “Internet sovereignty” is real and devastating”, Roseann Rife, Amnesty International’s East Asia research director, said in a statement.

“We should respect the rights of individual countries to govern their own cyberspace”, Xi said in a speech opening the second forum, whose version 1.0 a year ago was greeted with derision by activists who questioned China’s motives. And he said China was willing to help other countries learn from its development of the internet. That system uses tools to block – and as of this year also attack – Internet services the government deems unsavory, and employs manual labor to scour and scrub edgy and unwanted commentary from domestic web services.

When Xi visited the U.S. in September, China’s cyber czar Lu Wei appeared along with the head of state in the front row of a “family photo” of America’s tech giants, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The renowned human rights lawyer faces up to eight years in prison on the charges of “picking quarrels and provoking troubles” and “inciting ethnic hatred”, primarily on the basis of seven social media posts, in total around 600 characters, in which he criticized the government. “We should oppose unilateralism in global cyberspace governance”.

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.

“No country should pursue cyber hegemony, interfere in other countries’ internal affairs or engage in, connive at or support cyber activities that undermine other countries’ national security”, the president added. “This is a very important conference as the Internet is rapidly developing”. And he argues that China’s Cyberspace Administration is more open-minded than the country’s traditional propaganda apparatus.

Mr Xi also reiterated a call for states to work jointly on internet security.

That’s perhaps the greatest takeaway from China’s second World Internet Conference, which began Wednesday morning in Wuzhen, a historical village near Shanghai.

At the same time, however, the Chinese president also defended his country’s restrictive Internet censorship laws – the so-called “Great Firewall” that aims to keep residents from accessing certain websites – as being an indispensable implement needed for national security’s sake.

The country has about 650 million internet users but has been classified as the most censored country in the world by the Washington-based NGO Freedom House. Social-media postings can be deleted and search terms blocked, and websites including Facebook and Google have withdrawn from the country or been barred from operating.

Rights groups say any foreign tech firms involved in the conference are tacitly complicit in China’s online censorship. “We should fight against industrial espionage, hacker attacks against governments of other countries”, he added.

“Safeguarding the legal rights of foreign-invested businesses will not change”, said Xi.