When Baidu showed off its fleet of 18 driverless vehicles in downtown Wuzhen, Zhejiang, on Thursday there were only a few people in the heritage site to see it.
The waterside town, which usually has about 18,000 tourists a day, was cordoned off to host the three-day World Internet Conference, the annual gathering of the country’s biggest internet business players.
Only registered attendees can go into the town centre and the 1,600 guests and reporters must pass strict security checks to get in the exhibition centre during the event, which ends on Friday.
The restrictive mindset is similar to the mainland’s approach to managing cyberspace, with the Communist Party’s top leadership repeatedly calling for “enhanced” internet governance.
Wuhan University professor Ma Feicheng said users should be allowed to play a big role in the way the internet was run.
Cyberspace management should combine government governance and users’ autonomy