From your perspective, what are the characteristics of a powerful internet-driven country? What do you think are the advantages and challenges that China faces in becoming a powerful internet-friendly economy?
Wang Jing: Equality in information acquisition ensures fairness in market competition. China has an incentive and is making a great leap forward to becoming the most powerful internet player in nearly every aspect, thanks to increased technology development and a great population. A fairer market can help guarantee its takeoff, and may help every talent to give the full play in their initiatives regardless of unfair competition.
Xiao Hong: A powerful internet country will both boost the information development and ensure cybersecurity. In recent years, China has shaped itself into a powerful internet and telecommunication country, as the number of netizens reached 751 million, accounting for one-fifth of the total number globally. At the same time, we should realize that in terms of core internet technologies, there is still a gap compared to leading countries in the world.
Wang Xiaochuan: China has three main advantages. First, the demographic dividend. The more the users, the lower the marginal cost.
Second, the comprehensive improvement of national infrastructure, which makes the usage of Chinese internet very high.
Third, the Chinese people are dynamic and adventurous and have a passion for entrepreneurship.
I think the internet will continue to step up innovation efforts, which will have an influence on more sectors.
Compared with foreign countries, China has more motivation and determination to develop machine translation technology. We have great motivation and strong will to do well in English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation.
Do you believe that some of China's experiences or practices related to the internet or technology could be used to solve global problems? If so, what are they and why?
Wang Jing: Absolutely. China serves the biggest national population in the world. That brings China more data, strengthened computing power, and improved algorithms. Instead of C2C (Copy to China) model, a new trend of Copy-from-China is greatly underway.
Take online payments for example. China may not be the first one in this area, but no one can deny China made it the best - I don't even need to take cash with me when going out in China. I would say my new purse is that QR code.
Xiao Hong: China has incisive thoughts on balancing the needs of developing IT technologies and safeguarding internet security, which is of great significance for us to fully understand the internet's role in driving the society's development.
The government described the two issues of internet security and informatization as "two wings of a bird and two wheels of an engine".
China has called for more efforts to jointly build a community of shared future in cyberspace, emphasizing promoting humans' common well-being and respecting every country's sovereignty in the information space. This embodies the wisdom of the Chinese philosophy as well as a global vision.
Wang Xiaochuan: The development of the machine translation technology enables people to communicate across language barriers. Because information is asymmetric and incorrect, it is difficult for us to work together. And when we can communicate across languages, the civilization will be rewritten, wars will be fewer, and communication between different races will bring about a new kind of civilization.
