The Wuzhen Internet Conference

Wuzhen, a thousand-year-old ancient town in Chinese history. A great place for tourism — at first glance it has nothing to do with an internet conference. The historic buildings left behind by thousands of years combined with today’s technology throw up far too many questions. Following those questions, I went to Baidu first. Baidu only gave this simple introduction, and the internet conference was mentioned after it. I was still a bit dizzy: why on earth hold an internet conference in Wuzhen, why not in any one of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou or Shenzhen? Only later did I find out that Wuzhen was the earliest and fastest place in the country to adopt the internet, and the place where the internet economy is most developed — and of course, the organizers also deliberately wanted the internet conference to be held in a small town. And so the first World Internet Conference began in Wuzhen: no asphalt roads, no glass windows, everything kept as it originally was. A kind of ancient atmosphere set against scan-to-pay in the shops and high-speed wireless wi-fi on the flagstone paths seemed especially interesting. The internet conference will gather company representatives from more than a dozen countries and regions for three days to jointly discuss the development of the world’s internet. And so the first edition began.