China doubles down on internet control ahead of conference

The Communist Party's mouthpiece People's Daily warned in an editorial that China must break monopolies over core technologies and standards and remain untethered to other countries' technology supply chains.

The commentary, aimed apparently at Silicon Valley in unusually stark terms, comes one day after President Xi Jinping called for "more fair and equitable" governance of the internet at the opening of the state-run World Internet Conference. Since 2014, China has hosted executives from the likes of Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Alibaba in eastern China to promote its vision of an internet that is more tightly controlled by national governments rather than running unchecked as a transnational network.

The conference this week has highlighted US and China's competing and increasingly entrenched views about the internet, trade and cybersecurity, and the potential for these issues to become an enduring irritant in bilateral relations.

Xi reiterated the Chinese position of "internet sovereignty" over its 700 million Internet users, while other top leaders declared the country's willingness to work with the global industry for mutual benefit - if security could be assured on China's terms.

Earlier this month, China passed a broad cybersecurity law that gives law enforcement greater powers to access private data and requires data to be stored locally on Chinese servers. Human rights groups have voiced concern about police overreach while US firms have lobbied against the measure, saying it would wall off China's internet and unfairly hamper their access to the market.

Beijing has said the internet has been overwhelmingly dominated by the United States and it has backed a proposal to transfer control over some of the internet's core architecture to a UN agency, the International Telecommunication Union.

Critics, however, objected to letting authoritarian regimes like Iran and China get equal votes on matters affecting speech. The US government in September privatized control over the systems by transferring them to a non-profit oversight organisation.