Wuzhen highlights China’s net gains
Wuzhen, the ancient water town in Zhejiang province, is a slightly incongruous place for the latest 21st technology to be showcased.
The “Venice of the East” with its canals and architecture more suited to a different age, however, was host to the fourth World Internet Conference earlier this month.
The cold damp December air certainly did not lessen the enthusiasm of the 1,500 entrepreneurs, academics and officials from 80 countries who descended on what is only a small place.
This year’s conference was titled: “Developing Digital Economy for Openness and Shared Benefits Building a Community of Common Future in Cyberspace”.
And the tone was set by President Xi Jinping in a congratulatory letter read out on the opening day.
“Building a community of common future in cyberspace has increasingly become the widespread common understanding of international society,” he wrote.
“China’s door to the world will never close, but will only open wider.”
Few in the West have any understanding of the scale of the internet in China or the way it has embraced the sharing economy such as with dockless bikes or mobile payment — paying with credit or debit cards almost seems history here.
There is also little awareness of companies such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, operator of the WeChat, despite their scale. It was clearly spelt out in statistics released at the conference.
China’s digital economy was worth 22.6 trillion yuan ($3.35 trillion) in 2016, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, up 18.9 percent from 2015.
It is now bigger than the economies of either the United Kingdom, France or Italy and more than eight times that of Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria.
The entrepreneurial spirit in China’s tech sector was conjured up by Davis Wang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Mobike Technology, the company behind the orange bikes that are everywhere on the streets.
His company was a recipient of one of the World Leading Internet Scientific and Technological Achievement awards at the conference.
He said he was sitting in his office with colleagues three years ago and wondered what the solution was to air pollution and traffic jams.
“We noticed also that the use of bicycles had declined and wondered whether this could be reversed. We came up with a solution that combined smartphone technology with GPS tracking systems,” he said.
One of the most anticipated events at the conference was the impending launch of 5G — the fifth generation of mobile communications — which is a technology in which China could take a lead.
It is set to be with us in 2020 and will mean we will be able to download a movie in two seconds.
Of course, its real impact will be in taking technologies like the Internet of Things to the next level, paving the way for driverless cars and the rest of it.
According to one observer it will cause the digital economy to “explode”.
With nearly one-in-five of the 3.89 billion internet users around the world in China, no such regulation could work without China being involved.
What was clear from Wuzhen was that China was either on the verge of becoming, or maybe is already, the most important country in the world for the internet.