The so-called Global Internet Conference (GIC) is now in its seventh year in China, where the Internet is tightly controlled by firewalls. China’s 7th World Internet Conference is still being held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, but in a forum format, much smaller than in previous years as the neo-crown virus epidemic spreads around the world.
Zhao Zeliang, deputy director of China’s State Internet Information Office, said at a press conference on Monday (Nov. 2) that this year, based on the neo-crown epidemic and the profound changes in the international situation, the 23rd to 24th of this month in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, the conference was changed to the “World Internet Conference – Internet Development Forum”; there are new adjustments in the scale of the forum, showing “small and compact”, “new and live” new look, and to “offline + online” form of activities, set up in Wuzhen live venue, guests who can not go to the scene will participate in the meeting online.
China’s official media Xinhua News Agency reported Monday that the Internet Development Forum, themed “Digital Empowerment for a Common Future – Joining Hands to Build a Community of Destiny in Cyberspace,” will focus on new hotspots and new trends in the development of global cyberspace. Key guests from foreign government departments, international organizations and leading companies in the cyberspace sector, as well as representatives from leading academia, were invited to participate online.
China held its first World Internet Conference in Wuzhen in 2014. However, holding the World Internet Conference in China, which is considered to have the world’s tightest firewall, immediately drew much criticism from the outside world. Critics pointed out that it made a huge mockery of Internet freedom of information.
The U.S. rights group Freedom House released this year’s Freedom on the Net report on October 14, 2020, and China was once again ranked as the worst country for Internet freedom among 65 countries.
The report says that among the most censored topics online in China during this period were the Hong Kong protests, the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, and the detention of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.
Sarah Cook, senior research analyst at Freedom House, which does research on China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, said there is a very strong link between China being the world’s worst violator of Internet freedom and the spread of the epidemic. She says that the Xinguan outbreak has served as a catalyst for government intervention in online freedom for many countries that have experienced a reversal of online freedom of expression, but that China’s heavy-handed control measures were already widespread before the epidemic, and that the practices in the Xinguan outbreak reflect Beijing’s usual heavy-handed control tactics — a wide-ranging crackdown on freedom.
According to the Freedom House report, no country had more comprehensive and stringent surveillance during the Xinguan epidemic than China. Over the past two decades, the Chinese Communist Party has built the most technologically advanced surveillance system in the world, developing both high technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning for social control and deploying a low-tech manual censorship force.
China has demonstrated its so-called “voice” and international influence by hosting the World Internet Conference. But China’s control and regulation of the Internet was a source of ridicule for attendees, especially those from overseas. During last year’s World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, the closed Chinese network at the conference site prevented attendees from connecting to popular sites like Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube, and they had to struggle to climb the walls inside the conference venue via VPN.
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