Xi Jinping heads new panel on internet security and promoting IT
President unveils steering group that will direct internet growth in the consumer and corporate fields, and calls development a national priority
President Xi Jinping announced the creation of a new steering group tasked with overseeing internet security and IT development, which he will head, and called the tasks a national priority.
The central leading group on internet security and informatisation would lead and co-ordinate cybersecurity and the promotion of information technologies across various sectors, state media cited Xi as saying at the panel's first meeting yesterday.
"There is no national security without internet security, and there is no modernisation without wide adoption of information technologies," Xi said. "Efforts should be made to build our country into a cyberpower," he told the members of the leading group and other ministers attending the meeting.
Premier Li Keqiang and propaganda tsar Liu Yunshan, both members of the Communist Party's supreme Politburo Standing Committee, are the group's deputy chiefs.
There is no national security without internet security
Xi has steadily been consolidating power since he took the party's helm in late 2012. November's plenum of the party's Central Committee approved his administration's blueprint for reform, which included creating two powerful top organs, one to steer reform and another to co-ordinate national security. It was later announced Xi heads both.