More than 2,000 guests, roughly half from abroad, are invited to the World Internet Conference, which President Xi Jinping opens today in Wuzhen, a charming Chinese coastal town. The grand title is misleading: the gathering will not celebrate the joys of a borderless internet but promote “internet sovereignty”, a web made up of sovereign fiefs, gagged by official censors. Political leaders attending are from such bastions of freedom as Russia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The bosses of top Chinese internet firms such as Alibaba and Baidu, who have already accepted self-censorship as the price of doing business, are on show. Some foreign technology and media outfits blocked in China, such as Bloomberg, and others enduring official harassment, including Cisco and Qualcomm, are expected to turn up and kowtow. But unfriendly purveyors of “information weapons” (ie, news), such as the New York Times, have been warned to stay away.