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.
