From: gaojeng@durras.anu.edu.au (J. Gao)
Subject: CND 21-7-92 TUE
Summary: CND
Keywords: CND
Organization: Computer Services Centre, Australian National University
Date: 21 Jul 92 04:43:29 GMT

             * * *  C h i n a   N e w s   D i g e s t  * * *

                             (News Global)

                         Tuesday, July 21, 1992

Table of Contents                                                # of Lines
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1. News Brief (1 Item)...................................................10
2. Bank of China to Issue Foreign Currency Bonds.........................25
3. Former U.N. Secretary General De Cuellar Says:
      China's Violations of Human Rights "Grossly Exaggerated"...........26
4. Computer Networking in China ........................................160
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1. News Brief (1 Item)...................................................10
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[AP-DJ, 7/19] HONG KONG -- China plans to make the new northeastern port of
Tangshan its next special economic zone to attract foreign investment and
promote economic development, a newspaper reported Sunday.  Tangshan,
located in Hebei province less than 150 miles from Beijing, would be the
sixth special economic zone.  In a front-page article, the Ta Kung Pao
newspaper called Tangshan the 'Shenzhen of the north' because of its
planned export processing area and international port.  The newspaper
report said Tangshan port may be open to international shipping routes by
May.  Tangshan is an industrial and coal mining center that had a
population of 1 million when an earthquake destroyed it in July 1976.
(From: Jian Liu)

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2. Bank of China to Issue Foreign Currency Bonds.........................25
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From:    Jian Liu
Source:  AP-DJ, 7/20/92

BEIJING -- China's central bank is planning to issue bonds denominated in
foreign currency for the first time, the official Xinhua News Agency
reported Monday.

The issue, expected sometime this year, is to raise more hard currency to
finance China's rapid economic growth, said Wang Deyan, president of the
Bank of China.

The bonds can be purchased in U.S. dlrs and Hong Kong dlrs only, the report
said. It didn't give any other details about the bonds.

Wang made the announcement at a national meeting of Bank of China branches
on Monday.

The bank also plans to set up an organization to appraise the economic
health of Chinese enterprises. Those approved can obtain the bank's help in
issuing bonds in Chinese yuan and in foreign currency, Xinhua said.

It also said the bank would offer new services, including trading of hard
currency stocks and bonds.

The Bank of China also is considering setting up branch offices in the
former Soviet republics to serve the growing number of Chinese firms
involved in trade and business with the Commonwealth of Independent States,
Xinhua said.

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3. Former U.N. Secretary General De Cuellar Says:
      China's Violations of Human Rights "Grossly Exaggerated"...........26
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From:	 Tina Maria Tong <changb@acf3.NYU.EDU>
Source:  Agence France Presse, 7/16/92

HONG KONG -- Reports of human rights violations in China have been "grossly
exaggerated," former United Nations secretary general Javier Perez de
Cuellar said here Monday.

De Cuellar said that as a lawyer "I must act on the basis of evidence. I
don't think there is enough evidence which would allow us to say that in
China there is a tremendous violation of human rights."

"Violation of human rights in China has been grossly exaggerated," said the
Peruvian envoy who held the top U.N. post from 1982 to 1991.

He was speaking at a luncheon sponsored by Citibank marking the 90th
anniversary of the U.S.-based bank's entry into Asian financial markets.

On the military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in China on June 4
1989, De Cuellar said "I have no evidence to tell you sincerely" that
hundreds of people were killed.

"I've been trying to get evidence, but I haven't received any," he added.

The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International in May
said "Three years after the suppression of peaceful pro-democracy protests,
which resulted in the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Beijing... human
rights violations continue unabated in China. Thousands of political
prisoners remain imprisoned, including prisoners of conscience held solely
for the peaceful exercise of fundamental human rights."

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4. Computer Networking in China ........................................160
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From:    David K. Kahaner<kahaner@cs.titech.ac.jp>
By:      Franklin F. Kuo, SRI International. 7/15/92

At the invitation of the China Institute of Communications, the Citizen
Ambassador Program of People to People International arranged a visit for a
delegation of professionals in telecommunications and networking technology
to the People's Republic of China in May of 1992. I was the leader of the
delegation, whose purpose was to exchange information and solidify contacts
with Chinese professionals within the computer and communications industry.
The exchange focused on topics dealing with China's telecommunications
infrastructure. This group, known as the Networking Technology Delegation,
consisted of 24 members, with 18 professionals, and 6 accompanying spouses,
from the U.S., Japan, Germany, and Hong Kong.  Six members of the
delegation were native Chinese speakers.

Our professional visits concentrated on telecommunications and on computer
networking. We visited a number of the major research institutes and
universities in Beijing, Xi'an and Shanghai. In all three cities there was
a lot of interest in computer networking, especially in the Internet, and
how to connect to it. Another question that frequently came up was the
future of OSI vs that of TCP/IP. There are a lot of local area networks in
operation in China, connecting many PC-clones, mostly Chinese produced, to
some older-generation mainframes such as Honeywells. What we did not see
were operational wide-area networks, with the exception of a metropolitan
demonstration network in Beijing.

Current Wide Area Networks

At present, the major wide area network (WAN) in China is the China
National Public Data Network, CNPAC, which is currently being developed and
implemented. CNPAC, an X-25 packet switched network is designed to carry
data at speeds varying between 1.2 and 9.6 Kbps. The hub is in Beijing,
where the network management center is located, with packet switches sited
in Shanghai and Guangzhou, and PS concentrators found in other major
cities.  The packet switches, concentrators, and PADs (packet
assembly/disassembly devices) are all manufactured in China. At the Beijing
hub, there is an international access line to CNPAC. Since we did not see a
CNPAC demonstration, it is not clear how much of it is operational and how
much is still under development.  There are other private data networks in
use in China in applications in the railway system, banking system, civil
aeronautics, etc.

In China, there is an X.25 link to the Internet using a store and forward
system via the CNPAC international access line in Beijing connecting to the
University of Karlsruhe, Germany.  To the outside world, this link is being
called "the China Academic Network (CANET)".  In addition to CNPAC
connectivity, there is dial-up access to CANET from inside China. David
Kahaner of ONR Tokyo reports that he frequently communicates with Chinese
scientists via CANET. However, many of the Chinese networking specialists
we talked to have never heard of the name "CANET", so we suspect that CANET
means more to the outside world than in China.

The major problem confronting the development of WANs in China is the poor
telecommunications infrastructure. Since the penetration of basic plain old
telephone service (POTS) is less than 1% among Chinese businesses and
households, and since local and long distance telephone switching and
transmission facilities are inadequate and antiquated, it is difficult to
build a modern computer network upon the current telecommunications
infrastructure.  It will take decades to bring the basic telecommunications
system up to modern standards, so Chinese networking will take a long time
to come up to western norms also.

Metropolitan and Campus Networks

In Beijing, we witnessed a very impressive metropolitan networking project
called NCFC (National Computing and Networking Facility of China). NCFC is
a demonstration network in Beijing linking the two major universities,
Tsinghua and Beijing Universities to a number of research institutes of the
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Each of the participating institutions
have campus networks like the TUnet of Tsinghua University.  These campus
networks are connected by NCFC as a two level system. Currently NCFC has a
10Mbps backbone connecting the three campus networks, which will increase
to 100Mbps in the next phase of the project. Communication protocols will
be ISO/OSI, but TCP/IP is the first phase protocol. The top level of NCFC
consists of the backbone and the network control center.  The second level
is composed of campus networks at the two universities and CAS. NCFC is the
largest and most ambitious networking project we saw in China. It is
partially funded by the World Bank and the State Planning Commission, and
is in limited operation now, with full operation expected by 1994. We
visited two of the three groups who are participating in the development of
NCFC.  The first was the Computer Network Center (CNC) of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, with its own campus network, the CASnet.  The CNC
seems to have the major responsibility for the development of NCFC, and is
staffed by 40 professionals. The second group, in Tsinghua University, is
described next.

The Tsinghua University Network (TUnet)

The most impressive university networking group we visited was at Tsinghua
University, the premier technical university in China. Under the direction
of Professor Hu Daoyuan, the Tsinghua University network, TUnet is being
developed under a well laid-out strategy based upon the following goals:

1. It will be a universal, comprehensive campus network; its usage will
include instruction, research, administration, library, and communications
services.

2. It will be a multimedia integrated services network; messages transmitted
in the network will include not only data, but voice and video as well.

3. It will operate under accepted international standards for interfacing
devices to the network. Emerging standards are important in the fast
changing technology of networking. Initially TUnet will operate under
TCP/IP, but migration strategies have been adopted to migrate to ISO/OSI.

4. It will be a heterogeneous network using a variety of advanced
networking technologies (LAN, PABX, PS, ISDN and FDDI, etc) to interconnect
multivendor computing facilities.

5. It will be developed in phases, with the first phase (1987 to 1991)
concentrating on interconnection of facilties, and the second phase (1992
to 1995) emphasizing network services.

In TUnet there are three major networking facilities:

a. A circuit switched network based upon an integrated services PABX,

b. A packet switching network based upon X.25 switches and PADs,

c. Ethernet LANs interconnected through a 100 Mbps FDDI optical fiber backbone.

A key function of TUnet is electronic mail. Tsinghua University's message
handling system (MHS) functions includes mail, telegraph, teletext, fax,
videotex, voice, images, etc. The MHS is based upon the EAN system
developed by the University of British Columbia conforming to the CCITT
X.400 recommendation series of 1984. Tsinghua's work on its e-mail system
includes migration, Chinese localization, menu adaptation and the
implementation of remote user agents.

The work at Tsinghua on TUnet and NCFC underlines one of the basic
constraints that Chinese networking technologists must live with. Unless
you have foreign (hard) currencies to purchase networking equipment, you've
got to design and build everything from scratch, including hardware and
software. So TUnet represents in many ways a bootstrap operation. The
people in TUnet are all very well trained and dedicated.  It is unfortunate
that they could not make use of technology that is readily available in the
Western world.

Local Area Networks (LANs)

In China today there are many LANs in use. Two common LAN products widely
available throughout China are Ethernets from 3COM, and Netware, a LAN
operating system developed by the Novell company. These products are
available in China because of joint venture arrangements that the cited
companies have made with Chinese counterparts. Most of the LAN products are
manufactured in China under license from US companies such as 3COM and
Novell.  At the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Professor Yang Chuan-hou,
the Director of the Computer Network Research Laboratory presented to us
some work which dealt with an architectural design of a gateway
interconnecting LANs to an X.25 packet switched network.  The work again was
developmental in nature, in that both hardware and software designs were
implemented in the laboratory.

Work like that of Professor Yang and his colleagues illustrate the
practical nature of the networking development going on in China today.  I
visited China in 1984, when I was a World Bank consultant to Shanghai Jiao
Tong University.  In the intervening years, there has been an explosive
growth in both computing and networking technology in China, which will
only accelerate with the further penetration of the Internet into China.
Since the Internet is capable of bringing network specialists and users
throughout the world into a larger cooperating community, I believe that
China's networking community will soon become full partners in this
world-wide community.

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