From: TAN Shi <TAN@YALEVMS.BITNET>
Subject:      China-net Management Committee Survey: To Terminate China-net or
              Not?
Reply-To: TAN Shi <TAN@YALEVMS.BITNET>
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 05:57:00 GMT

Dear China-netters,

        China-Net has served the Chinese Students and Scholars (CSS) community
for over three and a half years, and it is the time to decide whether the net
should be kept as it is, changed in some way, or simply closed down.

        In the high tide of epic 1989 Spring, China-Net was created by a
group of dedicated CSS to provide a vital communication network for
coordination of the world-wide pro-democracy activities as well as for
exchange of information related to CSS communities.  The main coordinators of
China-Net were Guoying (Gorden) Chen (NYU), Haiquan Dai (U. Florida), Jiangang
(Jim) Dai (Stanford U.), Chen Ding (Case Western), Weihe Guan (U. Georgia)
and Gang Xu (Kent State U.).

        After the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and
Scholars, USA (IFCSS) was founded in July, 1989, China-Net was devoted to the
IFCSS as a volunteer coordination network for IFCSS' communication to its
constituents and other CSS communities.  Retrospectively, it is quite
legitimate for us to say proudly that China-Net made a critical contribution
to IFCSS' work and activities in its early years.  During that stage, China-
Net was a strictly regulated network that only CSS local representatives were
qualified to subscribe and were responsible for relay the information to local
CSS community.

        As time went by, many CSS's attention changed. The issues across the
China-Net were switched with diversity. It was conceivably necessary to
reconfigure the network to serve the new needs of CSS. Thus China-Net was
opened to general public to subscribe while remained to be a regulated
network, operated by a volunteer group: China-Net Management Committee (CNMC).
It had been a forum of debating policies and issues of IFCSS and CSS
communities.

        However, in the recent half a year or so, constructive debates have
gradually been replaced by irresponsible and unrestraint personal attack and
personal grudge.  Many cross fires were irrelevant or even contradictory to
the rule and objectives of China-Net. The quality of China-Net has been
deteriorated, the atmosphere polluted and, the very precious network resources
wasted. Such a downwords trend has turned many netters off and some of them
expressed their concerns to the CNMC, hoping for a change. But facing
shortage of manpower and lack of new issues, it is hard to expect the CNMC to
be able to reverse the environment alone, without the general netters'
contribution.

        Happily, now IFCSS has set up a Chinese Community Information Center
(CCIC). We feel greatly relieved that most of the duty China-Net has taken for
the IFCSS communication can be transferred to the newly established IFCSS
netowrk PBS-L through listserv@ifcss.org. For detail information about the
CCIC, please send a mail to: csc@ifcss.org. We think that the network
resource of China-Net can be saved for other needed purposes, and our current
duty can be released. The other functions of China-Net, such as open debates,
can be sufficiently substitute by two usenet which are totally unregulated:
soc.culture.china and talk.politics.china. To access these usenet on unix
system, just type "rn soc.culture.china" or "rn talk.politics.china", or
contact your local system manager for help.

        Yet we still leave this to you, the subscribers of China-Net, at this
stage. We decided to take the following survey to learn your opinion.
please send your reply to CNMC at: net-cord@lab.ultra.nyu.edu within next week
and we'll announce the result later.

------survey starts----------cut here-----------------------

I think China-Net shall:

  [ ] 1. be closed down.
  [ ] 2. be merged into the IFCSS communication system.
  [ ] 3. be the relay list for talk.politics.china.
  [ ] 4. keep the present status.
  [ ] 5. resume monitoring and posting privilege restrictions.
  [ ] 6. others -- please specify.

--------survey ends-------send to net-cord@lab.ultra.nyu.edu by 2/1/93-----

        It has been our honor and pride to serve the CSS community in the
netland and we will surely meet in other circumstances.

Best wish to you all.


China-Net Management Committee (CNMC)

Jian Ding       Univ. of Texas, Arlington
Weihe Guan      SUNY Buffalo
Guyang Huang    Univ. of Washington Medical School
Yuan Jiang      Columbia Univ.
Tong Shen       Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst
Shi Tan         Yale Univ.
Yang Wang       Georgia Tech.
Newsgroups: talk.politics.china