Not so fast, you techies President Clinton took off on Air Force One for his nine-day China tour with an official delegation packed with Cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries, staff chiefs, and even two presidential lawyers. But there wasn't one genuine high-technology wonk or exec on board who might come home with a strategy or two to help Americans tap into what could be the world's biggest wired market. Moreover, since the president and the vice president can't be off American soil at the same time, the nation's self-appointed chief IT officer, Al Gore, didn't get to go, either. Too bad, because China's plugging in new personal computers at a phenomenal rate. The country's current 400,000 private Internet accounts will balloon to an estimated 20 million by 2003, experts predict.
Shanghai even has Internet caf s.
With this phenomenal growth has come a basket of trade and information-technology issues between the two countries. Nevertheless, Clinton's traveling party has a low-tech quotient. Nevertheless, a reliable source tells me that several, prominent, technology company CEOs had inquired if there was room in the delegation. Commerce Secretary Richard Daley, a lawyer, an ex-Windy City mayor, is a former bank president, but hardly Mr. Wired. Still, he better make sure China's governmental technowizards are in Beijing and not decompressing in D.C. after visiting the First Annual World Technology Congress in Fairfax where Maggie Thatcher and Gorbachev keynoted and hobnobbed with a galaxy of global corporate tech execs.