The recent Sony hack should increase dialogue between China and the U.S. on how to respond to cyber attacks and how to improve cooperation in cyber governance. Both countries are suspicious of the other’s activities, but existing interconnected Internet infrastructure requires new forms of dialogue and accountability.

China-U.S. relations in the field of the Internet is now an important component of the new model of major power relationship. To a great extent, the Internet will decide the future of both countries.

With the state of global Internet governance in flux, Lu Wei’s new Cyberspace Administration of China is making strides to cement a uniform position on the content delivery aspects of Internet governance, a hugely complex project that also hopes to impact the way these questions are answered internationally.

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.