A long black slate wall covered in dark hexagonal tiles runs along the side of Nuhong Street in Wuzhen, China, eighty miles southwest of Shanghai. A gap in the middle of the wall leads visitors to the entrance of the Waterside Resort that, for the last nine years, has hosted China’s World Internet Conference, a premier event for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cyber policymakers.
The inaugural conference didn’t seem like a foreign policy forum. The thousand or so attendees from a handful of countries and dozens of companies listened to a speaker circuit asserting that 5G is the future, big data was changing the world, and the internet was great for economic development—hardly groundbreaking topics in 2014. But the internet conference was more than a platform for platitudes about the internet: it also served as China’s soft launch for its international strategy on internet governance.
By the last evening of the conference, some of the attendees had already left, choosing the red-eye flight home over another night by the glass-encased pool on the waterfront. Around 11 p.m., papers slid under doorways up and down the hotel halls. Conference organizers went room by room distributing a proclamation they hoped attendees would endorse just nine hours later. Attendees were stunned. The document said: “During the conference, many speakers and participants suggest [sic] that a Wuzhen declaration be released at the closing ceremony.” The papers, stapled and stuffed under doors, outlined Beijing’s views of the internet. The conference attendees—many of whom were members of the China-friendly Shanghai Cooperation Organization—balked at the last-minute, tone-deaf approach to getting an endorsement of Beijing’s thoughts on the internet. The document went unsigned, and the inaugural Wuzhen internet conference wrapped without a sweeping declaration. It was clear China needed the big guns, and perhaps less shady diplomatic tactics, to persuade foreigners of the merits of their views of the internet.
President Xi Jinping headlined China’s second World Internet Conference in 2015. This time the organizers skipped the late-night antics. On stage and reportedly in front of representatives from more than 120 countries and many more technology firm CEOs, Xi outlined a vision that is now enshrined in text as “Jointly Building a Community with a Shared Future in Cyberspace.” The four principles and five proposals President Xi laid out in his speech, which generally increase the power of the state and aim to model the global internet in China’s image, remain a constant theme in China’s diplomatic strategy on internet governance. In doing so, Xi fired the starting gun on an era of global technology competition that may well lead to blocs of countries aligned by shared censorship and cybersecurity standards. China has reissued the document many times since Xi’s speech, with the latest coming in 2022.
Xi’s 2015 speech came at a pivotal moment in history for China and many other authoritarian regimes. The Arab Spring shook authoritarian governments around the world just years earlier. Social media-fueled revolutions saw some autocrats overthrown or civil wars started in just a few months. China shared the autocrats’ paranoia. A think tank under the purview of the Cyberspace Administration of China acutely summarized the issue of internet governance, stating: “If our party cannot traverse the hurdle represented by the Internet, it cannot traverse the hurdle of remaining in power for the long term.” Another PRC government agency report went even further: blaming the US Central Intelligence Agency for no fewer than eleven “color revolutions” since 2003: the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center claimed that the United States was providing critical technical support to pro-democracy protestors. Specifically, the center blamed the CIA for five technologies—ranging from encrypted communications to “anti-jamming” WiFi that helped connect protestors—that played into the success of color revolutions. Exuberance in Washington over the internet leveling the playing field between dictators and their oppressed citizens was matched in conviction, if not in tone, by leaders from Beijing to Islamabad.
But China and other repressive regimes could not eschew the internet. The internet was digitizing everything, from social relationships and political affiliations to commerce and trade. Authoritarians needed a way to reap the benefits of the digital economy without introducing unacceptable risks to their political systems. China’s approach, called a Community with a Shared Future in Cyberspace, responds to these threats as a call to action for authoritarian governments and a path toward more amenable global internet governance for authoritarian regimes. It is, as one expert put it, China switching from defense to offense.
Full report:
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/community-watch-chinas-vision-for-the-future-of-the-internet/