Worth a look......
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 13, 2000; Page A1
By John Pomfret
NANJING, China ? Wang Siping is not your average Chinese "Web worm." For starters, she's a woman and from Qinghai province, one of the poorest regions in China. But the 25-year-old former soldier and bar hostess, who never attended high school, shares a common characteristic with many of China's Internet enthusiasts: She wants a new life.
"It's new and it's fun and it got me out of Qinghai," she said.
The search for a man brought Wang to the Web. She posted her face on a Chinese personals Web site and met a Hong Kong businessman who moved her to the leafy southern metropolis of Nanjing, where she now works in his company as a secretary.
"If it wasn't for the Web, I'd still be back in the desert," she said with a laugh.
Wang's story is emblematic of a quiet revolution in China being driven by the Internet. From children's books to online dating services to chat rooms in which almost anything goes, from pricing information for apple farmers to the latest tips about bars, brothels and billiards, the Internet is transforming lives across the country.
While Westerners may be focused on the Internet's potential to roil Chinese politics, its most profound effect has been to promote broader changes in the way people think, grow up and buy things in the world's most populous country.
The Internet start-up boom has become a magnet to draw Chinese students educated in the United States back to China, a homecoming of potentially great social, economic and political significance considering that only an estimated 3 percent of the 300,000 students who have left China since the late 1970s have returned.
It is connecting parts of China that, because of geography and history, have never really been united, a development as meaningful as the campaign that has laid more than 150,000 miles of road in China in the past six years. And it's happening at an incredible pace: Internet use has jumped from an estimated 620,000 Chinese in October 1997, the first time it was measured by the government, to 8.9 million people during the most recent survey last month.
The government's view of the Internet has been deeply ambivalent. While encouraging foreign technology investments ? and attempting to reap profits from them ? Beijing last month banned discussion of "state secrets" on the Internet in the latest attempt to harness a medium that is fast spinning out of the Communist Party's control. A party circular also said that all Internet content and service providers based in China must undergo a "security certification" process.
While the Internet is bringing people together in China, as it is worldwide, it is also pulling them apart and escalating the country's split into haves and have-nots. So far, about 80 percent of China's "Web worms" are centered around China's richest cities, and almost 80 percent are educated and male.
Wang Siping illustrates the split in Chinese society. In November, she competed in the Miss Internet China beauty pageant after beating out only six other contestants from Qinghai. By contrast, hundreds of women competed to represent the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hangzhou.
"Where I come from, the only net people know about is a tennis net," Wang said, "and that's only because people watch TV." Qinghai accounts for only 0.08 percent of China's Internet users.
"The Internet has created a new man and a new society in China," said Li Xiguang, the director of the Center for International Communications Studies at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University. "With the explosion in the number of Internet users, a new species of human being has come into being in China."
The American Influence
"Awesome!"
Joseph Chen, Nick Yang and Zhou Yunfan use the word nonstop, with varying fluency. They meet a fellow graduate of Stanford University: "Awesome!" They discuss the potential of the Internet in China: "Awesome!" They confide their feelings about returning home to help build a young industry: "Awesome!"
Chen, 30, Yang, 25, and Zhou, 25, met at Stanford. Backed by several million dollars from American investors, they started Chinaren.com last year ? an Internet "portal" that hopes to bring what Chen calls an "e-lifestyle" to China.
China's Internet revolution has an American look, taste and feel. Internet entrepreneurs spice their Chinese with American computer lingo. After a Chinese box lunch, they repair to one of Beijing's five Starbucks outlets for a java infusion. Although the state tries to block access to many foreign sites, including washingtonpost.com, Internet users share ways of getting around the restrictions. Many Chinese Web sites are modeled after American successes. And China's Internet dreams are powered almost solely by American investment ? an estimated $200 million so far from firms including GWcom Inc., Citigroup Inc., Intel Corp., Yahoo! Inc., Dell Computer Corp., Dow Jones & Co. and IDG Books Worldwide Inc.
"The Beijing minute is faster than the New York minute right now," said Chris Mumford, a former New York investment banker who co-founded an Internet start-up, Yaolan, which plans to sell baby-care products throughout China. "If you leave here for a month, you always notice something new. The environment is constantly changing."
In an economic system in which promotions and success are traditionally tied not to ability but to seniority, the youth of China's Internet entrepreneurs is another reflection of their American models. The oldest employee at eLong.com and Chinaren.com, two Chinese start-ups, is 35.
Even fashion mimics the laid-back look of Silicon Valley. Charles Zhang, who returned to China with a PhD from MIT to start Sohu.com, a popular portal, favors Nikes and bluejeans over business suits. Zhang, thanks to relentless publicity, has become something of a sensation in China.
"Are you a Ping-Pong star? An athlete?" gushed a waitress at a British-style pub a few blocks from Zhang's Beijing office one recent night. "No," Zhang replied, "I'm on the Web."
Beijing Is Watching
But freewheeling Web culture goes only so far in China. Police have installed monitoring equipment on all of China's major sites. Shanghai authorities last week shut down 127 unregistered Internet cafes, and a few Chinese have been arrested for posting politically sensitive material on the Web. And all Chinese Internet portals employ people to weed out politically incendiary statements from China's raucous Internet chat rooms.
China's economic policymakers also have tried to limit foreign participation in Web ventures. Last year, they tried to stop foreign investors from buying pieces of China's Internet industry, but that effort failed. Now, foreigners can own up to 50 percent of China's Internet firms. In the latest twist, Beijing announced that private Chinese Internet firms will need government approval to list their shares overseas. But that battle isn't over yet.
China's Internet entrepreneurs have tried to accommodate the government without scuttling the appeal of the Web. Chen, the co-founder of Chinaren.com, is developing a special software to monitor its chat rooms automatically ? weeding out buzzwords that could offend the country's leadership.
"We think our self-censorship should be up to government standards," said Chen, who is an American citizen. "We want to be cool and patriotic ? at the same time."
Even so, the talk on the Web is some of the freest in China. Many Chinese know about the $10 billion smuggling scandal unfolding in the southern city of Xiamen, for example, because they read about it on the Web; Chinese papers have been banned from reporting about it. The need for political reform is a common topic in Chinese chat rooms but so are demands that China stand up to the United States.
Some liberal Chinese aren't comfortable with the polemics churned out in various chat rooms. Since NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May 7, much of the chat has taken on a strong nationalist bent. A campaign launched on the Web blasted President Jiang Zemin for not reacting more strongly to NATO's attack.
Wang Xiaodong, a writer and self-described nationalist, thinks China's liberals are foolish to be concerned. "The thing you see on the Web is the real face of China," he said, referring to the mix of jingoism and democracy.
But many Chinese welcome the cacophony of Chinese sites.
"The Internet will affect China more deeply than other societies because China is a closed society and the Internet is an open technology. It will force China to open more," said Guo Liang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and one of the premier writers on the Internet in China today. "In 1989, I was in Tiananmen Square. We failed then. The Internet won't fail."
In some ways, Chinese Internet companies play fast and loose with rules that in the United States are taken more seriously. 8848.net, for example, is marketing itself as China's foremost e-commerce site and claims $1.4 million in sales a month. But Chinese sources said the firm inflated its e-commerce figures by getting businesses to "route" purchases through the site, even though the goods were bought or sold by traditional means. "Their real figures were much lower," said a Chinese investment banker. Company officials did not respond to numerous telephone messages asking for comment.
Still, e-commerce is growing in China. Turnover jumped 400 percent last year ? from $8 million in 1998 to more than $40 million, according to government figures.
Overseas, the Internet has sparked an enthusiasm for the China market reminiscent of turn-of-the-century traders who dreamed of selling every Chinese an American toothbrush. Chinese call American venture capitalists "crazy" capitalists for their enthusiasm for almost any Chinese firm.
John Harris, the chief executive officer of CBQ Inc., a Texas-based e-commerce firm, recently put down $150 million to buy a Chinese software company and then invested an additional $15 million for an Internet service provider.
"It's coming in a wave that's all tall as this hotel," he said, speaking in the tony confines of the 16-story Beijing International Club Hotel. "If you're not ready, you're dead."
An example of the power of China's Internet buzz is Etang.com, a Boston-based e-commerce firm started by a native of Shanghai who got an MBA from Harvard. In less than six months the firm has raised $43 million even though its chief executive officer, Tang Haisong, doesn't know what it wants to sell.
"We're working on that," he said.
¸ 2000 The Washington Post Company
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