Turing Laureate Whitfield Diffie meets with reporters after the opening ceremony of the Fifth World Internet Conference, which kicked off in Wuzhen, Zhejiang province, on Wednesday. (XU JINGXING/CHINA DAILY)
Driven by the coming-of-age mobile payment technologies, healthcare, education and entertainment sectors have all benefited greatly from the booming digital wave.
According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the size of China's digital economy hit 27.2 trillion yuan ($3.93 trillion) last year, accounting for 32.9 percent of the country's gross domestic product, up 2.6 percentage points year-on-year.
"(During the process), we are expected to support different kinds of innovation based on the internet and enlarge support to innovative small and medium-sized enterprises or SMEs in the early stage, to inject fresh impetus to the digital economy," said Huang.
Huang's remarks are in tandem with the country's ongoing moves, epitomized by the country's telecom companies which are already working on a number of cross-border network infrastructure projects.
A case in point is the Asia-Africa-Europe-1 cable system, a 25,000-kilometer submarine cable system linking Asia, Africa and Europe, that entered service last year. China United Network Communications Group, or China Unicom, the country' second largest telecom carrier, is a key participant of it.
As the world's largest submarine cable system built in more than a decade, it will provide the lowest latency express internet route among dozens of countries and regions across Asia and Europe, according to China Unicom.
At the conference, Huang also called for global trust and cooperation in protecting data safety to further promote the construction of cybersecurity systems and safeguard global network security.
Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab, a world-leading Russian computer security firm, appreciated the country's foresight in safeguarding cyberspace security.
"China, as one of the world's largest IT markets, boasts huge amounts of data. China's information and technology market is also growing at a rocketing speed," said Kaspersky.
"The Chinese government has been paying high attention on cyberspace security and protection of key information infrastructure. This is extremely important when internet becomes a vital infrastructure," he said.
