At a recent dinner in Beijing, Jim Jarrett, Intel's president for China, sat next to an eightysomething woman whose 80-plus husband is a senior Chinese official. That's his window on the world. Officials at China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications say they hope to have 4 million Chinese connected by the year 2000. As late as 1996, most Net traffic to and from China had to flow through a single 56-kilobit circuit in Shanghai, less bandwidth than many U.S. homes enjoy. Access to foreign sites would remain under government control.
China has every right to find a balance between local and foreign content.
That's a balance the most nimble Chinese gymnast would find tough to maintain. The Net, after all, is designed to be open. And if the idea of the Web is to make Chinese firms more competitive, that means letting them have access to everything from DuPont's chemicals website to the U.S. Patent Office's listing of new inventions. For that reason, some Chinese think the government will drop all its talk about an intranet and throw open the doors. It's all U.S. content.