BEIJING – China on Sunday said it aims to become a “great power” in theonline world and took a swipe at Washington on trade, kicking off itsannual conference promoting the Communist Party’s controlled and censoredversion of the internet.
US-China rivalry is increasingly playing out in the digital sphere, asBeijing pursues dominance in next-generation technology while Washingtontakes measures to cripple Chinese tech firms like Huawei.
China heavily monitors and censors its internet, with US titans Facebook,Twitter and Google all hidden behind a so-called “Great Firewall” that alsoblocks politically sensitive content.
At the yearly World Internet Conference, held in the picturesque ancientcanal town of Wuzhen since 2014, Chinese officials talked up the country’stech prowess.
“We have become a cyberspace power of 800 million netizens,” the head ofthe Communist Party’s propaganda department, Huang Kunming, said in akeynote address.
Huang added that in the future, China “will unceasingly expand the fruitsof internet development and forge ahead from a cyberspace ‘big power’ to acyberspace ‘great power'”.
The propaganda chief also denounced “cyber-hegemony and bullying” by othercountries — using language typically reserved for the United States — whichhe said were behind confrontation in the high-tech world.’Internet sovereignty’
The US is threatening crippling sanctions on Huawei, which is expected tobe a leading player in the advent of ultra-fast 5G communications that willmake many new technologies possible.
“Some countries have placed restrictions on and suppressed other countriesand companies, escalating uncertainty and even antagonism in cyberspace,”Huang said, without naming the United States directly.
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The US commerce department also earlier this month said it will blacklist28 Chinese entities it says are implicated in rights violations and abusesin China’s Xinjiang region, where an estimated one million mostly Muslimminorities are held in internment camps.
President Xi Jinping has previously sketched out plans for China to gaindominance — with heavy assistance from the government — in key futuretechnologies by 2025, a strategy that has caused US alarm.
The conference has faced foreign criticism as an attempt to whitewash theCommunist Party’s cyberspace controls in the name of “internet sovereignty”rather than viewing the web as an open global resource.
In the past, the event has drawn leading US tech CEOs such as Apple’s TimCook and Google’s Sundar Pichai.But with the US-China tensions simmering,this year’s conference lacks any high-profile US figures.
Silicon Valley has also been embroiled in recent efforts by Beijing to stepup pressure on foreign companies deemed to be in support of Hong Kong’spro-democracy movement.
Earlier this month Apple removed an app criticised by mainland China forallowing Hong Kong protesters to track police, a move which sparked fiercecriticism and accusations of bowing to China. -APP/AFP
