Building a community with shared future in cyberspace
The Chinese delegation submitted a position paper on global cyberspace governance at the first meeting of the Plenary Session of the Global Mechanism on developments in the field of information and communication technologies in the context of international security.
The submission of the position paper at the forum, which is being held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from Monday to Friday, reflects China's anchoring of digital security on the principles of data sovereignty and cyber sovereignty.
The paper articulates a natural and logical extension of the Global Governance Initiative that China has proposed, along with its long-standing commitment to building a community with a shared future in cyberspace.
The core tenet of the paper rebuts the approach of some developed countries that want a digital ecosystem as an unregulated domain where might makes right, and where they can coerce smaller nations to choose sides over AI hardware, cloud infrastructure and data standards.
China's position paper, on the contrary, enshrines a foundational right long demanded by developing countries: the autonomy to chart their own digital and AI development courses. No country should be pressured into adopting foreign AI products or algorithms; every nation deserves the freedom to make its own choices, free from technological arm-twisting.
At the heart of this vision lies China's steadfast adherence to mutual respect for national sovereignty and the fundamental norm of noninterference in the domestic affairs of other states. China calls for collective management of the cybersecurity risks posed by AI — from unregulated large language models to the misuse of autonomous AI agents — and demands updated, inclusive international cyber rules fit for the age of generative intelligence.
With digital domains — cyberspace, data pools and frontier AI — becoming a new arena for interstate competition, China advocates extending the UN-centered norms of fairness, peaceful development, civilizational diversity and collective sustainability to technology governance. This stands in unmistakable contrast to the zero-sum approach of certain Western countries.
The Chinese suggestions align with the priorities of a vast majority of countries, especially those in the Global South whose voices have too often been marginalized in decades of technology rulemaking.
The contrast between China's open source, open weight AI models and the United States' closed source AI ecosystem offers a real-world illustration of these two paradigms. Washington's closed source AI model consolidates AI supremacy in the hands of a few tech giants aligned with the US government, restricts the diffusion of global technology, and weaponizes technological scarcity to maintain Western dominance in global digital competition.
China, on the other hand, by prioritizing shared innovation and universal accessibility, is breaking down technological monopoly barriers and enabling developing countries to access and iterate on frontier AI technologies independently. This approach transforms the advancement of AI from a privileged asset for a handful of nations into a global public good benefiting all of humanity.
China's thriving digital economy and competitive AI industry ecosystem have equipped it to counter the monopolization of technological discourse and standard-setting by developed countries. Beijing harbors no ambition to dominate cyberspace; its objective is to prevent digital and AI tools from becoming new geopolitical battlegrounds and to ensure that the dividends of the new technology are distributed fairly across the world.
This commitment was demonstrated at the recent 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance, held in Shanghai, which showcased China's dedication to providing solutions and international public goods to ensure openness, cooperation and shared technological progress for the benefit of all nations.
