China’s President Xi Jinping calls for nations to support cybersecurity and outlined its dedicated efforts to curb cybercrime at the World Internet Conference on Wednesday.
"Each country should join hands and together curb the abuse of information technology, oppose network surveillance and hacking, and fight against a cyberspace arms race," Mr Xi said in the conference.
The theme of the conference is ‘’An Interconnected World Shared and Governed by All – Building a Cyberspace Community of Shared Destiny ‘’. The conference is intended to shape a better human society in the new internet era.
Mr Xi emphasised that cybersecurity is a global responsibility and a safer internet can only be possible if every nation is committed to the cause. He also called for a ‘democratic’ global internet governance with no country having predominance over another.
“No country should pursue cyber hegemony…it is the right of individual countries to independently choose their own model of cyberspace governance” said Mr Xi.
Mr Xi maintains that every country has the right to censorship and internet regulations. This is different from the viewpoint of the west which advocates a universal standard of free expression on the world through the internet.
Currently, China regulates the internet by criminalizing certain online speeches and activities, blocking from view selected websites, and filtering keywords out of searches initiated from computers located in mainland China.
Mr Xi regards freedom as an autonomy that is highly associated to stability and said, ‘’ Freedom is what order is meant for and order is the foundation for freedom’’.
The conference attracted executives from Chinese and U.S. tech giants.
Several government representatives including Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Kazakhstan Prime Minister Karim Massimov were also in attendance.
Last year, it was used as a platform for Beijing to map out long-term plans for governance and control of the Internet.
(Image from Foreign and Commonwealth Office– CC BY 2.0)
