The first state sponsored World Internet Conference was recently held in Wuzhen, China. Its main goal was to reinforce the idea of Internet sovereignty for individual nations, which has been decried by the U.S. as a veiled attempt to impose China’s state-centric approach to Internet governance to the wider world.

Polls indicate Chinese citizens have more trust in the central government than local government, a reverse of the United States, which largely distrusts the federal government. Han-Teng Liao argues that China’s Internet guiding and monitoring might be the beginning of a trust-building mechanism.