BEIJING — Three years ago, 29-year-old Yuan Yue quit his job with the Ministry of Justice, gave up his government-supplied apartment and ventured into the brave new world of business.
After a lean beginning, Yuan and his associates built Horizon, their market research and public opinion polling company, into a thriving enterprise with branch offices in two other Chinese cities. Earlier this month, Yuan proudly added the newest symbol of "making it" in China--an Internet e-mail address.
In a development that has implications for business, scholarship and human rights, the People's Republic of China is rapidly getting wired--the latest technological breakthrough forcing the nation's integration with the outside world.
The Internet has already arrived in other parts of Asia, where governments are giving it a mixed reception. So far in China, there has not been a peep from the Communist state about the dangers of the free exchange of ideas in cyberspace.
In contrast, the orderly city-state of Singapore, often viewed as a model of rigid governance by China's Communist leaders, threatened recently to censor burgeoning traffic on the Internet, especially that critical of the country's neo-Confucian ethos.
Chinese traffic on the information superhighway increased early this month when two new Internet servers were opened by the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications in cooperation with Sprint International, based in Reston, Va. That makes at least eight networks, mostly at universities and scientific institutions, now linking China to the Internet.
The newly established Sprint system is the first to be offered to the general public, although so far only in the major cities of Beijing and Shanghai. To promote its use, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications is offering it free on a trial basis to potential customers.
Because getting on the Internet requires a computer, a modem and a telephone--items not within the budget of the vast majority of China's 1.2 billion people--it may be a while before e-mail becomes a common feature of life here.
"The cost is still too high for the common people," said Wang Yong Le, project officer for computer networking with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Just to get a new phone costs 5,000 yuan ($600)." Only one in 200 people has a telephone in China.
But Susan Horvath, researcher at Merit Network--an Ann Arbor, Mich., company that monitors international Internet traffic--reports that China is one of the world's fastest-growing Internet users, transmitting more than 12 billion bytes of data in January after starting at zero in early 1993.
Significantly, Horvath noted that the number of bytes coming into China from the outside (9.3 billion bytes) in January far exceeded those going out (3.27 billion bytes).
That means people here--mostly university scholars and scientists--are already taking full advantage of a new gateway to Western databanks.
China's Internet traffic is still very light compared to that in North America and Europe. According to Merit Network, the volume of Internet usage on the major "backbone" services in the West now approaches 20 trillion bytes a month.
But the momentous fact that the world's last great Communist power has come on-line has been both applauded and nervously noted by many inside and outside China. "China is taking its first, tentative steps into the information age," said a diplomat in Beijing, "but I'm concerned about the fragility of the thing."
The Internet, enthused Halsey Beemer, a project officer with the World Bank, "encourages scientific cooperation across institutional and national boundaries." Under Beemer's supervision, a $131-million World Bank project to connect China's major universities and research institutions via the Internet so that they can share a U.S.-model supercomputer is scheduled for completion this summer.
China's scientists eagerly testify to the virtues of the Internet.
"It's helped us a lot," said celebrated Beijing University plant geneticist Chen Zhangliang. "We send DNA sequences we find to a databank in the U.S. to determine what kind of gene we have."
But in a development the Chinese Communist leaders might not find so palatable, the possibilities of the Internet have also been noticed by international human rights organizations.
China Human Rights Forum, directed by a board composed of Chinese political exiles--including well-known investigative journalist Liu Binyan--is one of several organizations that have established their own Internet addresses to disseminate articles opposing the Beijing Communist regime.
Another U.S.-based Internet forum, Digital Freedom Net, offers access to the collected writings of Chinese dissident leader Wei Jingsheng, who disappeared last April when he was arrested outside Beijing.
