This reputation has been built on the back of its signature conference, the World Internet Conference (WIC), which was first held in 2014. This year, the three-day WIC, which opened on October 20 with the theme Intelligent Interconnection for Openness and Cooperation—Building a Community With a Shared Future in Cyberspace, brought together more than 1,500 participants from over 80 countries and regions, including Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners and members of the Internet Hall of Fame.

In his message, Chinese President Xi Jinping said with the Internet embracing a stronger development momentum and broader development space, it is the common responsibility of the international community to develop, use and govern the Internet well so that it can better benefit humanity.

He also said countries should follow the trend of the times, shoulder their responsibility for development, meet the challenges and risks, jointly promote global governance in cyberspace and strive to build a community with a shared future in cyberspace.

Technology of the future

The piano at the entrance of the Light of Internet Expo Center in Wuzhen, a new exhibition venue opened this year, had an unusual player. To the amazement of visitors, two huge robotic arms positioned before the keyboard moved dexterously over the keys and began playing a popular Chinese folk song.

The two arms of the industrial robot were remotely controlled through 5G. Thanks to the negligible latency of the technology, they could play in perfect coordination. It was one of the many displays of 5G application at the WIC, which was fully covered by a 5G network. Other applications ranged from robot patrols and remote surgery to ultra-high live streaming and automatic delivery, making Wuzhen a microcosm of a wondrous future world.

The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of the Internet and the 25th anniversary of China connecting to the World Wide Web.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, the number of Internet users in China was 854 million in June, with the Internet penetration rate reaching 61.2 percent. "The past 50 years have seen the global Internet penetration rate cross 55 percent," Wu Hequan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said. "China outperformed the world's average in 25 years."

Apart from the fast growth of Internet users and coverage, the past years also saw the intelligentization of the Internet with the advancement of technologies.

Fifteen of the world's leading scientific and technological achievements in the Internet sector were unveiled at the WIC this year. They included achievements by Chinese companies, like Huawei's Kunpeng 920 processor, Baidu's open-source deep learning platform PaddlePaddle, Alibaba's next-generation cloud database POLARDB and Tsinghua University's hybrid Tianjic chip architecture. Some of the remarkable new applications by non-Chinese companies included U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla's full self-driving chip, Microsoft's machine-reading comprehension technology and German software company SAP's in-depth application of artificial intelligence in intelligent enterprises.

Wan Gang, President of the China Association for Science and Technology, said science and technological innovation will bring more potential to the Internet sector, and hoped these achievements would be applied wider in society.

5G era

5G was a keyword as 2019 marks the year of the commercial use of 5G. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology estimated in 2018 that the commercialization of 5G would drive China's direct output value to about 484 billion yuan ($68.4 billion) in 2020. By 2035, it would create direct output value of 6.3 trillion yuan ($890.3 billion) and indirect output value of 10.6 trillion yuan ($1.5 trillion).

Lu Qi, CEO of Y Combinator China, a U.S. seed accelerator, said 5G technologies with large broadband and high speed will bring massive changes and opportunities.

Chinese mobile phone maker Xiaomi, which has become one of the most popular brands worldwide, has seen the opportunity. Its CEO Lei Jun announced at the conference that Xiaomi would launch 10 versions of 5G phones in 2020. The global economic slowdown and intensifying competition, both at home and abroad, have seen Xiaomi's market share drop. In the second quarter of 2019, it held 11.8 percent of the domestic smartphone market, down from 13.9 percent in the previous year, research firm Canalys said. So the 5G boom is expected to improve Xiaomi's business.

Lu also warned of difficulties in applying 5G technologies, saying there is still a long way to go.

Hong Yaozhuang, CEO of GSM Association that represents mobile network operators worldwide, pointed out one challenge. The top priority for the 5G industry is to determine how certain spectrums are used globally, or it will affect the future development potential of the digital world, he said.

Tian Suning, President of China Broadband Capital, outlined three abilities companies would need in the era of 5G when new businesses emerge: perception, cognition and prediction.

The digital economy

"China's digital economy is booming, becoming a new engine to innovate ways of economic development," Nan Cunhui, Vice Chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, said. "Information technology has been empowering manufacturing, business and all walks of life, propelling the country forward."

In 2018, China's digital economy grew to 31.3 trillion yuan ($4.4 trillion), accounting for 34.8 percent of the GDP, according to the China Internet Development Report 2019 released on October 20. The annual growth rate of the digital economy exceeded 20 percent in the past three years, said Ren Zhiwu, Deputy Secretary General of the National Development and Reform Commission.

In view of the immense potential of the digital economy, the government has announced plans to establish six national-level pilot zones for innovation and development in related fields. The pilot zones will be established in Xiongan New Area in the northern province of Hebei, Chongqing Municipality and Sichuan Province in the southwest, Zhejiang Province in the east, Fujian Province in the southeast and Guangdong Province in the south. The regions will seize the opportunities to deepen supply-side structural reform and play an exemplary role in the emerging sector, Yang Xiaowei, deputy head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, said.

The business community is also sharing its wisdom and resources to embrace the new business. "To develop the digital economy, yesterday is not as important as tomorrow, and methodology is not as significant as imagination," William Ding, founder and CEO of NetEase, a Chinese Internet technology company, said.

He said governments and enterprises should invest in people and eliminate useless information, which is an important direction for consumption upgrade in the future. Only those who improve the efficiency of information acquisition and provide premium services will become the new driving forces of the digital economy, according to Ding.

Chen Qiangsheng, CEO of JD Digits, a Chinese fintech company, emphasized that enterprises should not create new industries to compete with the existing ones, but instead integrate their accumulated capacity with the industries' experience and rules to realize the digital transformation and upgrade.

Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said new business in the digital era should put its focus back on people. Companies' attention should be given to individuals and benefit for the whole society. He called traditional competition a zero-sum game—either win or lose. But in the digital era, competition is transforming into a positive-sum game and a win-win game.

Shen Nanpeng, global executive partner with Sequoia Capital, a U.S. venture capital firm, predicted two future trends in the digital economy. First, it will become more globalized. Apart from China and the U.S., a string of unicorns are emerging from other regions like India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa. A unicorn is a private startup valued at over $1 billion. Second, it will permeate all kinds of fields and nearly all industries will become Internetized, digitalized and cloud-based.

Global governance

The digital economy, experts said, is inseparable from cybersecurity. In fact, they are two sides of the same coin. "With the development of digital technologies and the digital economy, the loopholes in various software are increasing and cybersecurity is facing unprecedented threats," Zhou Hongyi, Chairman of the Chinese Internet security company Qihoo 360, said. "The threats are no less powerful than nuclear weapons."

Zhima Credit is an example. It is a credit rating system of Alipay, the online payment arm of Alibaba, creating credit rating profiles of hundreds of millions of Alipay users and collecting data on their financial behavior, such as consumption and payments. If its database security is breached, given the huge number of Alipay users, China's financial system will be compromised.

The development of international trade, cross-border e-commerce and logistics and the flow of company and users' statistics will also lead to new security issues. Thus, how to ensure security and who will be in charge of supervising the process are issues to be clarified.

"However, no unified regulation or consensus has yet been reached among international players. Internet governance still exists just among countries or companies," UN Under Secretary General Liu Zhenmin said. He warned that if cooperation in the Internet field is not strengthened as soon as possible, the gap in new technology will widen further.

Keeping that in mind, the Advisory Council of the WIC Organizing Committee summed up five challenges in Internet governance that need to be addressed in cooperation. They were outlined in the Wuzhen Outlook 2019 released on October 20: bridging the digital divide, which has become a new challenge in an age when integration and innovation of information and communication technologies is accelerating; improving development policies and regulatory rules against the backdrop of a booming global digital economy; deepening and broadening Internet cultural exchange; addressing new security risks; and rebuilding trust throughout the international governance of the cyberspace.

Computer scientist David J. Farber, commonly known as one of the "fathers of the Internet," said the Internet space is indomitable to some extent and communication in this virtual world is complicated and changeable. People from different countries have different mindsets, cultural backgrounds, rules and regulations, so it is hard to come up with a unified management system.

"But one thing is certain, governments and institutions should try their best to take the measures that they think are correct and govern local Internet space," he said.

"We believe there is one Web in the world," Zhang Li, Assistant President of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said.

China does not want the government to control the Internet, but hopes that all the stakeholders perform their own functions as well as regard the governments as the main responsible party to fight Internet crime and terrorism, prevent Internet wars and protect national key information infrastructure, he said.

Copyedited by Sudeshna Sarkar

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