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To: ztect who wrote (700)	2/17/1999 10:09:00 PM
From: ztect	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1541

lots of COMPETITION including CHINA INTERNET partnered w. AOL August 3, 1998, Monday Business/Financial Desk NYTIMES Bringing China on Line (With Official Blessing) By MARK LANDLER Peter Yip is not shy about his ambitions. As he steers a visitor through the bustling offices of the China Internet Corporation here, Mr. Yip describes how his company will be a catalyst for bringing the Internet to China and its 1.2 billion people. Employees are busy collecting news dispatches from Reuters and Bloomberg, which they send to Beijing to be translated into Chinese. Later, China Internet will post the material on its service, where anyone in China with a computer and the $30-a-month subscription fee can log on to a world of Western news. ''The Chinese Government recognizes that the Internet is a global thing,'' said Mr. Yip, 43, the vice chairman of the company, which is based in Hong Kong and backed by the official New China News Agency -- not to mention an impressive array of American technology companies. ''That's why they've established a strategy and asked me to help them create a vehicle to allow people to participate.'' It is that kind of pronouncement that makes Mr. Yip's rivals seethe. They say China Internet, known as C.I.C., is only one of dozens of companies throughout the country that are racing to put China on line. In China, as in the United States, the Internet seems to be growing too rapidly -- and in too helter-skelter a way -- for any single company to mastermind its development. ''Because the Internet has taken China by storm, there are very different proposals about how to develop it,'' said Don Xia, chief executive of Unicom Media, a Hong Kong company that is developing Internet services for China Unicom, one of the country's two main telephone companies. To Mr. Xia and others here, the debate is whether China's Internet should be open or closed; raw or edited, anarchic or controlled. Mr. Yip's company, they say, represents a more controlled, Government-directed approach. At the same time, hundreds of small-time entrepreneurs, most of whom lack China Internet's financial backing or political connections, are laboring to build a truly free Internet. ''C.I.C. is out of step with what Internet users in China are about,'' said Duncan Clark, managing director of BD Associates, a telecommunications consulting firm in Beijing. ''I think companies that make deals with them are actually doing themselves a disservice.'' The American companies that have made investments in China Internet, or formed other kinds of partnerships with Mr. Yip, include America Online, Bay Networks, Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems. And whatever the controversy that Mr. Yip may arouse, the success of his sales pitch is proof that a Chinese Internet is no longer just a utopian vision, but a ripe opportunity for sharp-eyed entrepreneurs. According to the latest Government statistics, 1.18 million people are using the Internet in mainland China -- nearly double the number last October. While cyberspace is still largely the preserve of 20-something men, it is growing beyond its roots as a tool for academics. Nearly 80 percent of those surveyed said they had bought merchandise over the Internet, and many said they used it for information about entertainment, sports and business. After much hand-wringing, Beijing seems to have decided that the benefits of the Internet outweigh its dangers. Although it still filters the content of the World Wide Web through central computers -- and periodically blocks access to Web sites such as those of Western news providers like CNN and The New York Times -- Beijing is also upgrading China's network to carry more data, and it has licensed more than 30 companies to offer Internet access. ''The Chinese see the Internet as the savior of their economy,'' said Kenneth Farrall, a Web site designer who lives in Xiamen, in southeastern China, and is starting an Internet consulting firm. ''My impression is that the people blocking Web sites are paying lip service to the old guard in Beijing.'' Yet for all the talk about openness, Internet executives here say the Government is still drawn to the idea of creating a vast intranet within the country. Such a network could tap the Web's riches but remain walled off from features deemed subversive -- like pornographic sites, postings from dissidents or anything about Taiwan or Tibet. China Internet's model is tailor made for this approach. The company, which was started in 1994, operates a proprietary news service called China Wide Web, which has about 1,000 subscribers. For a fee of $30 to $340 a month, depending on the level of service, subscribers receive stock quotations and news from the New China News Agency, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Nikkei wire service and Agence France-Presse. But they cannot gain Web access because the service does not have an Internet connection. By contrast, the majority of people in China who use a dial-up service to get Web access pay a monthly fee of roughly $68 for unlimited use, plus access charges amounting to 50 cents an hour. Mr. Yip said his long-term goal was to turn the China Wide Web into a Chinese version of the World Wide Web, a vast consumer marketplace with Chinese-language information and entertainment. He said the lack of such content was the biggest hurdle to Internet growth here. ''If you're in New York and you get on the Web, and everything coming at you is in Arabic, you're not going to stay on all that long,'' said Mr. Yip, who lived in the United States for 20 years and speaks rapid-fire English. Another analogy for the China Wide Web may be America Online, a subscription-based service that organizes material in a form more digestible than on the Internet. Unsurprisingly, China Internet has a partnership with America Online, in which the companies are developing a Hong Kong version of America Online service. Mr. Yip's competitors point out that America Online has a link to the World Wide Web, while the China Wide Web does not -- which keeps the Internet's less acceptable material out of the country. ''The China Wide Web is an attempt to create a Web that is isolated from the Net,'' Mr. Clark of BD Associates said. ''We're kind of past that already.'' Mr. Yip acknowledged that the China Wide Web's lack of an Internet connection was a weakness. But he said it was for financial, not political, reasons: the dominant phone company, China Telecom, had set access fees too high. Unless the Government broke up China Telecom's virtual phone monopoly, it would make no sense to offer Internet access. China Internet's close ties to the New China News Agency mean other restrictions. The agency has several editors in the company's offices who sift through dispatches from the Western services and pull any that run afoul of laws barring the distribution of political news about Taiwan or Tibet. ''We're relying on Xinhua to interpret Chinese law and insure that we don't stray,'' Mr. Yip said, using the press agency's Chinese name. So far, China Internet has skirted trouble by sticking to less controversial business and financial news. Its other products include inoffensive features like a Chinese-language site about the World Cup and one about the film star Bruce Lee. But Mr. Yip said that merely by distributing Western news, China Internet was doing its part to open the country. Mr. Yip, who started and sold several technology companies in the United States before returning to his native Hong Kong in 1989, said the industry's hostility reflected envy at his success in attracting partners and frustration that most companies are still losing money on the Internet. Indeed, by most yardsticks China Internet would not seem that big a threat. It has fewer subscribers than many of China's struggling Internet-access providers. It has less than $10 million in revenue and is losing money, although Mr. Yip said he expected annual revenue to exceed $25 million in 12 months. And a much-publicized joint venture with Pointcast, the leading purveyor of ''push'' technology on the Internet, fell apart because of financial disagreements. Still, Mr. Yip has raised $25 million from investors, and he has turned China Internet into the first stop for technology companies seeking to capitalize on Internet growth. Some rivals said China Internet represented the triumph of salesmanship over substance. ''It's like a Hong Kong-style newspaper,'' said Edward Zeng, chief executive of Unicom-Sparkice, another Internet venture backed by China Unicom. ''It's different than a Western-style newspaper. There's more promotion.'' Mr. Yip said he was wounded by the criticism. He said he had sought to build bridges to the younger entrepreneurs, even introducing some to executives or venture capitalists in the United States. ''I don't want to be perceived as Big Brother, trying to control the Internet,'' he said with a sigh.

To: ztect who wrote (700)	2/17/1999 10:17:00 PM
From: ztect	Respond to of 1541

only a tourist's view October 25, 1998, Sunday Magazine Desk NY Times Word & Image; A Great, Irrelevant Wall By Max Frankel On a visit to China, my main question turned out to be a media question. Can the Internet scale the Great Wall? Can the global flow of information and images penetrate the defenses of a rigid old oligarchy? Can China run a free market economy without a free market in ideas? I went with a group of art lovers assembled by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to savor the treasures of an ancient civilization. So my view of modern China was only a tourist's view. In the teeming cities, I ranged just a few blocks from incongruously luxurious hotels. And I saw the densely settled and planted countryside mainly from air-conditioned buses and Yangtze River boats. A warning stapled into my passport said I was ''not allowed to engage in news report activities,'' not even the superficial interviews I managed on my first visit in 1972 to record President Nixon's obeisance to the Red giant. No matter. The observable changes are palpable and startling. Communism has expired. Commerce has exploded. People who were required by the Emperor Mao a generation ago to hide their individuality in blue uniforms now sport sneakers, jeans and T-shirts heralding Michael Jordan and Colonel Sanders. The dank courtyard houses that once sheltered most of China's urban masses have been swept away for vast acres of stolid apartment blocks and forests of fantastical skyscrapers rising 30 and 50 stories even where there is not yet enough electricity to power their elevators. Acrid pollutants from soft-coal industries, outdoor kitchens and car exhaust foul the air and sting the skin. The rural population of 900 million still labors mostly by hand. In long hours on the road, I saw no farm machinery and only an occasional water buffalo roaming a paddy. And the urban minority of 400 million travels mostly by bike. Yet the streets and highways are clogged with taxis and automobiles that enterprises confer upon the privileged ''few'' -- which in China has become a very large number. The Buicks rolling off a new Shanghai assembly line had to be refitted with a more capacious rear compartment because, their marketer explained, they are destined for people ''who never sit in front.'' Those rear-seat riders are the beneficiaries of huge foreign investments and generous or larcenous sell-offs of national assets. They and their educated employees form a new class whose living standards are centuries beyond those of China's still half-literate peasantry. The E-mail, fax machines and nominally illegal satellite dishes serving this new class easily circumvent the information controls that the reigning Communists try to preserve. And even the party and army elites send their children to colleges abroad. Will the new class stay bought by the ruling party or conquer it with political reform? Nixon's melodramatic ''opening to China'' a generation ago was staged mainly to worry the Soviet Union and to finesse the American retreat from Vietnam. He had no compunction about embracing a tyrannical Mao, the conqueror of Tibet and author of the mad and bloody ''cultural revolution.'' But Mao's successors have now staged an equally dramatic ''opening to the West'' to ignite China's economy. People in China worship anything foreign, from McDonald's to Lancome. General Motors discovered that its Buicks sell better when branded with English letters rather than Chinese characters. Every doll and mannequin has a Caucasian face. A thousand television stations convey American-style talk shows and Western soaps to the poorest slums. According to American reporters and diplomats in Beijing and Shanghai, people's fear of criticizing the regime, at least in private conversation, has been fading fast. And some of that criticism goes beyond griping to a yearning for more open debate and opposition. No one contends that civil and political rights are secure, but there is hope that the privatization of housing, farming and commerce and the opening of China to so much foreign influence will inevitably produce political reform or convulsion. That is the faith also of those Americans who favor ''engaging'' Chinese society despite the Government's authoritarian ways and brutalities. They argue persuasively that computers in the cities and television sets in the countryside are generating appetites and discontents that the regime cannot restrain or satisfy. The pressure for ever more growth, they predict, will produce organized oppositions that clamor to be heard and protected by the rule of law. Enlarging contacts is also the counsel of less optimistic observers like John Bryan Starr, author of a clear-headed book, ''Understanding China,'' that proved a reliable guide. Starr perceives a ''widespread skepticism about democracy'' among China's politically conscious citizens because they think their country's history, culture and size make it ungovernable by democratic means. But he also believes that China's corrupt and rigid one-party state has lost so much of the public's confidence that it may well collapse abruptly, like the former Soviet regime. Whether government in China evolves, dissolves or convulses, the chances are that it can never again seal its borders against the global Babel of voices, including voices of freedom. And the effects are not only economic. As Starr observes, ''The cultural scene is the part of Chinese society that most closely approximates the non-Chinese world.'' He finds ''a freedom to explore and experiment, to enjoy or reject, that never existed in China before and that does not yet exist in other parts of Chinese society even today.'' Thanks to MSNBC and CNN in the hotels that cater to foreigners, I learned of the conclusions of a different author named Starr. Chinese home sets, however, get no news with their Star-TV programming from abroad because a craven Rupert Murdoch won his franchise by agreeing to banish the BBC. But news and information nowadays travel many alternate routes. China's Great Wall, an impressive relic, serves only to attract more foreigners. It cannot defend an archaic politics.

To: ztect who wrote (700)	2/17/1999 10:22:00 PM
From: ztect	Respond to of 1541

"...no one knows the true size of Internet use in China...... because many users share accounts...." ============================ November 16, 1998, Monday Foreign Desk NYTimes A Trial Will Test China's Grip on the Internet By ERIK ECKHOLM The trial of a 30-year-old computer executive, soon to begin in Shanghai, heralds a new electronic battleground for China's political dissidents and security forces determined to preserve Communist Party control. Lin Hai, the defendant, is charged with ''inciting subversion of state power.'' Prosecutors say that from September 1997 until his arrest in March, Mr. Lin gave tens of thousands of Chinese E-mail addresses to ''hostile foreign publications.'' In particular, they say, he provided addresses to an electronic newsletter called VIP Reference, which is compiled by Chinese democracy advocates in Washington and sent to hundreds of thousands of computer-users inside China. According to the indictment, Mr. Lin helped the newsletter ''carry out propaganda and incitement by distributing essays inciting subversion of state power and overthrow of the socialist system.'' Mr. Lin appears to be the first legal casualty of a building struggle, as Internet users here and abroad make shreds of the Government's efforts to censor political debate and filter foreign news. VIP Reference -- which sends out reports on dissident activities, essays and reprinted articles on human rights and other issues -- is the most prominent of several electronic forums that are breaching China's information defenses. ''We're promoting freedom of speech on the Internet,'' said Feng Donghai, a software engineer at Columbia University who moved to the United States three years ago and helped start VIP Reference last fall. ''They are putting Lin Hai on trial to set an example.'' The main VIP Reference, sent out every 10 days, mostly includes essays and debates on democratic topics. A subsidiary Daily News edition, sent daily, includes detailed accounts of dissident initiatives and arrests. The main newsletter is now sent to more than 250,000 addresses in China said its publisher, Lian Shengde, who spoke from Washington. The Daily News edition goes to about 25,000, and the numbers are steadily climbing as sympathizers send in lists of Chinese addresses. The newsletter accepts addresses indiscriminately -- many are from commercially traded lists -- then mails to everyone. The theory is that when so many are automatic recipients, individuals cannot be accused of deliberately subscribing. ''We're posing a new problem for the Communists,'' said Mr. Lian, a software engineer in his 30's who moved from China after the 1989 military crackdown on student-led demonstrators in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. ''I don't think there's any way they can stop us.'' Another, similar publication is Tunnel, a self-described ''webzine'' of commentary written in China and sent electronically to the United States from where it is wired back to thousands of accounts inside China. Addresses are, for VIP Reference, www.ifcss.org/ftp-pub/org/dck and for Tunnel, www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Bay/5598. Chinese-script software is required. A third newsletter, Public Opinion, is edited and distributed electronically from inside China. It includes commentaries and reprints of items taken off the Internet and is produced by a group of young computer company workers who call themselves ''political netters.'' Over the last year, these newsletters, plus assorted on-line discussion groups, have become important means of communication among political activists, said Xiao Qiang, executive director of Human Rights in China in New York. China now has some 1.2 million Internet accounts, many shared by several users, with the numbers zooming. The Government has encouraged hookups in the interest of promoting national development, but is fighting a losing battle to control political uses. Chinese officials use an electronic ''firewall'' to block access to web sites it deems objectionable, including those of human rights groups and some considered pornographic. But it cannot keep up with new sites, and clever users can sidestep the firewall. E-mail is virtually uncontrollable, although agents can identify a particular individual and read that person's mail. China's security agencies have formed special units to fight not only conventional computer crimes like illegal break-ins and fraud, but also the spread of dissident information. To evade Government filters and electronic disruptions, VIP Reference is mailed from a different American address every day. Somehow, the authorities zeroed in on Mr. Lin. Last week, Mr. Lin's wife, Xu Hong, learned that his trial will begin on Nov. 26 but will be a closed proceeding so that she cannot attend. The lawyers she hired will be present but, Ms. Xu said by telephone, ''I'm afraid the lawyers won't have much influence on the results.'' If convicted as charged, Mr. Lin may face a prison sentence of five years or more. He and his wife have a 20-month-old son. Ms. Xu, who says her husband is innocent, said that E-mail addresses are ''public information, like telephone books, which can be exchanged or purchased.'' He has never been involved in politics, she said. =================================== January 21, 1999, Thursday Foreign Desk E-Mail to U.S. Lands Chinese Internet Entrepreneur in Jail By SETH FAISON A court here sentenced a computer engineer to two years in jail today in a case watched closely by people monitoring official efforts to control China's growing use of the Internet. The Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate Court ruled that Lin Hai, 30, committed a subversive act last year when he sent 30,000 Chinese E-mail addresses to VIP Reference, an electronic publication based in the United States that the Chinese authorities consider hostile to Beijing. Mr. Lin, who was arrested last March, ran a software company that set up Web sites and offered other Internet-related services. Mr. Lin's wife, Xu Hong, said her husband was not interested in politics and had simply been exchanging E-mail addresses to build a database for his on-line business. But prosecutors argued that the names provided by Mr. Lin had been used to distribute ''large numbers of articles aimed at inciting subversion of state power and the socialist system.'' VIP Reference, one of many electronic publications that distribute news about China, is compiled by Chinese democracy advocates in Washington. Editors of the newsletter say they send information to 250,000 E-mail accounts in China. Efforts to restrict the exchange of political information on the Internet, these editors contend, are fruitless because of the volume and variety of electronic commerce. Chinese officials formally embrace use of the Internet as a necessary part of efforts to modernize their economy and society. At the same time, special task forces monitor political content on the Internet and block some Web sites carrying information that Beijing deems unfriendly. Although no one knows the true size of Internet use in China because many users share accounts, one recent official estimate said 2.1 million people in China were on the Internet by the end of 1998, up from 670,000 a year earlier. In such a fast-growing environment, the case against Mr. Lin looks like a throwback to an earlier era, when Beijing had tighter control of the spread of information. It may also reflect a decision by the authorities to make an example of someone seen to be helping a publication like VIP Reference, if only indirectly. Mr. Lin's two-year sentence, harsh by any international standard, is relatively light for a charge of political subversion in China. In a recent crackdown on efforts to set up a democratic political party, three leading dissidents were given sentences ranging from 11 to 13 years in prison. In a country where the official media offer dull versions of the news, some Chinese on-line services feel freer to provide flashy news accounts that do not go through the same official censors as newspapers, television and radio. Although the Communist authorities would clearly like to maintain their once-firm control over access to information, they are steadily becoming overwhelmed by the growth in more open communication -- by telephone, fax and now by Internet -- that has come with efforts to modernize China's economy. The official New China News Agency reported today that a recent survey of young people, ages 14 to 28, found an overwhelming hunger for access to the Intenet. But 69 percent of those surveyed said they had no way to get on line. Only 3.4 percent of the young people said they surfed the Internet regularly. At the same time, only 7 percent said they had no interest in the Internet, and 6 percent said they had not heard of it. ''There is still a long way to go before the Internet becomes truly popular among Chinese youth,'' the news agency concluded.

To: ztect who wrote (700)	2/17/1999 10:28:00 PM
From: ztect	Respond to of 1541

"...a country where phones are still party lines, computers are scarce..." Source: NYTimes.. Internet-Fluent M.I.T. Students Teach Basics in China By JULIE FLAHERTY DAN DWYER, a sophomore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knew that spending last summer hooking up a high school in Beijing to its first Internet connection was not going to be easy. But his biggest obstacle was not tussling with the Chinese bureaucracy or outmaneuvering Government restrictions on Internet access. It was the telephone. When he tried to call the high school's computer director at home one evening, ''the person who answered the phone said, 'You'll have to call right back,' '' Mr. Dwyer said. ''It was one phone line that was shared by two families living in adjacent apartments.'' Sharing the wonders of the Internet with the rest of the world is a noble pursuit, but bringing thousands of dollars' worth of equipment and all that cutting-edge knowledge to a country where phones are still party lines, computers are scarce and few have even heard of the World Wide Web might seem laughable. Not to the students who volunteer for the China Educational Technology Initiative (web.mit.edu/mit-ceti/www), an M.I.T. program that sends college students overseas to teach high school students about the Internet. Two years ago, two graduate students, Jake Seid and Ron Cao, not only persuaded M.I.T. to let them go, basically unsupervised, to set up the first Web site at a high school in China, but they also later persuaded the school to talk big-name companies into sponsoring them. Last summer, the program sent 13 students. This summer, 24 new interns have traveled to 9 high schools. They go in teams of two or three, including at least one student who speaks either Cantonese or Mandarin and at least one who speaks the more exotic languages of Java and HTML. Together they set up a server and teach the students to create Web sites. Mr. Seid and Mr. Cao (pronounced sow) came up with the idea as an alternative to the typical graduate-student project. ''Why is it important that two M.I.T. students write a report on telecommunications that nobody is going to read?'' said Mr. Seid (pronounced sayd). ''It really made us think, what do we want to accomplish?'' And where? News articles they read in 1996 described China as extremely cautious in its exploration of the Internet. Those who did have Internet accounts had to register with the police, and those who applied for accounts had to sign an agreement to abide by Chinese law and not endanger state security. The M.I.T. students soon learned, however, that they could set up sites on the Chinese Educational Research Network, which connects all the universities. True, some schools are hesitant to encourage access to sites outside China, not because of censorship but because most are charged for every such site they call up. ''Two years ago there were a lot of questions about who should be hooked up to the Internet,'' Mr. Seid said. ''I think they took a chance on us.'' Some of the student-built Web sites are written in both English and Chinese. The Fudan High School site (highschool.fudan .edu.cn) has pictures of the school, names of award-winning students, even a photo of Cao Tianren, the headmaster. Another school's site offers a practice test for the college entrance exam. ''It's more than just connecting the wires or getting a computer into the school,'' said Robert Yung, Sun Microsystems' director for technology in Asia and a project mentor. ''This is about how do we teach, how do we show people how to use the technology?'' So far, Sun Microsystems and other companies have donated more than $250,000 worth of hardware and software. Each team has to figure out a strategy for its project, from getting the hardware shipped to figuring out how to teach Java programming to 40 ninth graders in six weeks, a commitment that impressed Mr. Yung, who discussed the teams in a recent interview. ''I'm amazed at their energy level,'' he said. ''It was finals week at M.I.T. this week, and I still get E-mail from them at 3 in the morning. I look at them and say, 'Why don't I take care of this problem? You go and study.' '' The months before the trip are filled with incessant E-mails, faxes and phone calls. (The translators have the worst of it, they agree, because they have to deal with the 12-hour time difference.) Another first -- setting up a wireless Internet connection to a Chinese high school -- took days. The five-floor high school building did not have telephone wires, so the volunteers used antennae to connect it to a university, and its dedicated line, about a half-mile away. ''We never even saw the buildings -- it was all through E-mail,'' said Roger Hu, who went to Shanghai as a freshman. ''We needed to see what buildings were in the way, if they would interfere with the line of sight. They would go up and on the roof and say, 'Oh, yeah, I can see the building from there.' '' The students' Chinese hosts were eager to help. Some of the schools updated their computers or bought new ones. So many people were interested in their progress that last summer the American students held a conference about the Web in education that drew chief executives, school principals and Chinese Government officials. The China Education Technology Initiative inspired another M.I.T. student, Ameet Ranadive, to start a similar program in India last year. The population there is approaching one billion, but only 100,000 have Internet access. Mr. Ranadive, who will be a graduate student in the fall, said he planned to have the Indian students start pen-pal relationships with the Chinese students using E-mail. ''If you start with small steps like that, at least it's promoting connections with the two sides,'' he said. The interns have concerns about nuclear testing in India, human rights violations in China and civil war in Africa, where yet another M.I.T. student is looking to start a similar program. But they keep their corner of cyberspace apolitical. ''What I heard about China was all very negative things,'' Mr. Seid said. ''You'd hear about issues like Taiwan, you hear about the Dalai Lama and Tibet, you hear about Tiananmen. Then you hear about the people. It's a very different perspective than what you hear about the Government.''