China’s Web presence could soon lead world
Tan Wei

ACCORDING to a China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) report released on January 17, the country’s online population gained another 73 million in 2007-a yearly growth rate of 53.3 percent-to reach a record high of 210 million users. China is adding 200,000 more Internet users daily and quickly approaching the day when it will surpass the United States numerically, which currently has 215 million netizens. Liu Bing, Director with the Department of Internet Research and Development under CNNIC, says China’s economic boom is the major factor in the surge. “These days, the concept of the Internet as a recreation tool is gaining currency and an increasing number of people are turning to it for online entertainment,” Liu said. “The Internet’s low cost amid all-round surging prices gives people an extra incentive to go on the Internet for fun.”
Ever popular
In past CNNIC reports, those between 18-30 with high school education or above made up the majority of Internet users. However, 2007 was a turning point for the diversification of the online population. According to the report, the numbers of netizens aged under 18 beginning to use the Internet in 2007 posted the most robust growth, led by a high proportion of middle and primary school users. Furthermore, the population of netizens over 30 has also begun to swell. Internet fever is spreading through all age groups, and now reaches people in low-income and low-education groups.
Liu ruled out possible changes to current Internet revenue streams in China, which could arise from changes in the composition of Internet population. “Advertisements, search engines, online games and value-added mobile services will remain the main sources of income for the Chinese Internet industry,” he said. “Constrained by their hi-tech thresholds, businesses like e-commerce and online education are less likely to see sharp profit growth.”
Rural vitality Rural areas also made significant contributions to the increase in China’s online population. In 2007, rural netizens numbered 52.62 million, representing an exponential annual growth rate of 127.7 percent, far exceeding the 38.2-percent growth rate in urban areas. This means 40 percent of the 73 million new users last year were from rural areas. “This could not have happened without a helping hand,” Liu said. In line with the 11th Five-Year Plan, the Chinese Government has earmarked 3 billion yuan ($416.67 million) to incorporate all villages and towns into the fixed-line phone and Internet network. Rural governments have already begun installing Internet information kiosks in some areas. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Information Industry distributed universal service funds in collaboration with other ministries in an attempt to spur the development of rural telecommunication technology.
“Some quasi-non-governmental organizations like CNNIC are also dedicated to this cause,” noted Liu. In November 2007, CNNIC spearheaded a project to launch websites in every county of Tibet Autonomous Region and has completed operation and training of staff in eight pilot government websites in Tibet. Huge gaps still exist between urban and rural Internet development. In rural areas, proportion of Internet users is still a measly 7.1 percent, according to the CNNIC report, far behind the urban proportion of 27.3 percent. This leaves much room for improving rural Internet communications in the future.
Further development Another highlight of the CNNIC report was how Chinese netizens spend their online time. Entertainment topped the list of activities, with accessing music online as the favorite activity registering a use rate of 86.6 percent. Using instant messenger and watching online films were next in line, with use rates of 81.4 percent and 76.9 percent, respectively. According to the survey, 94.2 percent of netizens said the Internet had enriched their leisure time. Recreational use does not automatically mean the Internet has already become a pivotal social infrastructure, according to Yan Hongqiang, Vice Director with the Bureau of Telecommunications Regulation under the Ministry of Information Industry.
Kang Guoping, Inspector General of Blogchina.com, holds a similar opinion. “The dedication of netizens to online entertainment will undermine the social effects of the Internet,” Kang said. “Our government departments should take full advantage of the Internet for maximum social achievement. For example, Americans enjoy great access to public services and information through such things as Mapquest, Google maps and Weather.com. What do we have in China? Without adequate applications, even our broadband is under-utilized.” Mobile access lags behind As a communication tool, mobile phones have become common in China. According to statistics from the Ministry of Information Industry, China boasts 530 million valid SIM cards. The CNNIC report showed that there are 400 million mobile users in China, each of whom owns an average of 1.33 SIM cards.
Free from the location constraints of traditional Web access, mobile phones have started to become complementary devices for Internet use. Surfing the net via mobile phone has become trendy. In the past half year, 50.4 million netizens have accessed the Internet by mobile phone, or 12.6 percent of all mobile phone users. As one of the Internet users with mobile access, Kang confessed to only reading online news on his mobile phone. “Even those who are well acquainted with the Internet like I am only use low-level applications,” Kang said.
It was also noted in the CNNIC report that low speed and high costs are standing in the way of mobile Internet use in China. Without the third generation (3G) technology, mobile access is slow. As a result, downloading a video through a mobile phone doesn’t make sense to those who can download the same video on their computer much faster and at little or no cost. As a leading player in mobile-accessed Internet services, South Korea has about 51.3 percent of its mobile users accessing the Internet by mobile phone. It will take many painstaking efforts for China to catch up with its neighbor in this regard.
Mastering the domain
As a top-level domain name, CN has become a symbol of China. More importantly, the domain name CN bears heavily on China’s information security. Registering with the domain name CN is conducive to guaranteeing that the Internet decision-making power stays in China, safeguarding its information security and sharpening its competitive edge in international information tussles. As for users, the domain name CN is administered by Chinese organizations, where Chinese laws have binding force regarding Internet disputes.
For a long time, the domain name COM was nearly synonymous with the Internet itself. However, 2007 could be seen as a watershed. As the CNNIC report said,
China’s online population is bursting and has been accompanied by an escalating number of registered CN domain names. In 2007, 7.82 million domain names were created in China, reaching a total of 11.93 million, with an annual growth rate of 190.4 percent. Most of the newly registered domain names are CN, and there has been a daily growth of about 20,000 in the past year. The domain name CN has so far gained a dominant position in China, holding 75.4 percent of the total, followed by 20.4 percent having the domain name COM. China currently ranks second in the world for its top-level domain name, only second to the 11.28 million of German DE.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review  Articles Exchange Item)

Olympics and the mob
Simon Jenkins

COME on, confess it, you have not enjoyed a story so much in years. A round-the-world marathon with all-in wrestling, kick boxing, rugby tackling and sanctimonious steeplechasing, staged free of charge in the streets of London, Paris and San Francisco by the International Olympics Committee — and before the Beijing games have even started. To add to the joy, nobody gets hurt except politicians. On one side are Gordon Brown, the Chinese politburo, senior London 2012 figures, the IOC fat cats and 1,000 jogging policemen, all playing protect the holy flame’ as if in a scene from Harry Potter. On the other side is an old-fashioned mob. The mob wins and the nation splits its sides with glee. The old left dares not walk the streets of London these days, but must tremble behind a million pounds worth of police protection. Sweet is the sight of the boot on the other foot.
I have decided that the mob is a much underrated political phenomenon. In London last weekend (April 6)it reduced the Olympic torch parade to a Keystone Cops farrago. Then in Paris it extinguished the flame altogether, and in San Francisco it forced the proceedings to vanish into an early grave. Some pundits consider such demonstrations undignified and ineffective in an era of television studios, e-politics and blogs. But they said that of rock concerts. The mob helped kill the Thatcherite poll tax in the UK, felled the Berlin Wall and brought Yeltsin to power in Russia. It toppled dictators in Serbia and Ukraine, and may yet do so in Kenya and Zimbabwe. A crowd running amok in the streets of a capital somehow outguns opinion polls and election victories in the minds of rulers. When those in palaces of power peer round their curtains and see the howling throng, their knees go weak and some primitive instinct communicates defeat.
This week’s mob in London, Paris and San Francisco was tiny and unrepresentative of mostly non-violent Tibetan opinion. But by attaching itself to a publicity stunt, the mob delivered a humiliating blow to the mightiest dictatorship on earth, China. It also exposed the hypocrisy of the IOC’s Jacques Rogge, now trying to pretend that, ‘with hindsight’, awarding the games to Beijing was not a great idea as they might be exploited politically. He should have listened. The torch tour, shorn of the mental candyfloss about world peace and harmony, was political. It was conducted by Chinese heavies and patronised by has-been celebrities and publicity-hungry lobbyists. As for the IOC, it failed to withdraw its approval even when told the tour would climax in the former Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Rogge and his crew have spent so long immersed in five-star hotels that they cannot tell a Gandhi from a Ghengis Khan. The Chinese have taken them for the mother of all rides. Never were so many conned so rotten by so few.
The mistake of this tour was its hubris. Had the Chinese and the IOC been shrewd, they would have avoided democracies altogether, or at least they would have run the torch inside stadiums, where they could ensure photo-opportunities with politicians smiling as they received free tickets for Beijing. Instead they craved geographical authenticity. They thought with Kipling that they could ‘talk with crowds and keep your virtue’. They accepted the advice of the IOC, that playing to the mob would serve the glory of them both. They both got a raspberry. That said, every catastrophe has a silver lining. The Olympics can now go in one of two directions. The costly-is-beautiful politburo-cum-New-Labour Olympics are irrevocably tainted and seem incapable of purging themselves. As the cameras roll, the anthems play and the flags fly in the forthcoming orgy of chauvinism, every contestant in Beijing must be pondering what political statement to make on the rostrum, whether about Tibet or George Bush or Tower Hamlets borough council. Hecklers will shout, banners will wave and thugs will beat up bystanders. Track and field will be way down the news list.
If London sticks to this agenda in 2012 — and Brown’s GBP9bn pledge suggests it will — then it should make the best of it and plan a parallel Olympiad of protest. By then the event will be regarded globally as a festival of political activism, like G8 summits and United Nations assemblies. With so much publicity and so much hype, it will be the occasion for mass campaigning about anything and everything. The theatre of the street will out-dazzle the theatre of sport. Unlike G8 summits, the games offer real leverage to a mob. Nobody but caterers cares if a G8 summit is disrupted or abandoned. But $20bn to $30bn is invested in an Olympics these days, with just two weeks to make a return. That time sensitivity offers street activists extraordinary power, power that may even induce the Chinese to lighten their repression at least until August.
London would be a splendid venue for a political Olympiad. It has long been a place of refuge and asylum. For the period of the games its doors should welcome any cause, however worthy or crackpot. Halls should be open for rallies and churches for protest. Let Trafalgar Square be standing room only for the duration. While the IOC tucks into the taxpayer’s champagne at Fortress Stratford, back in central London anarchism can rule and Jowell’s torch of harmony become the torch of glorious discord. Much nonsense is uttered about the Olympics not being political. Anything rooted in blatant nationalism is political. Anything so expensive as to impose a multibillion-pound opportunity cost on the host nation is political. Anything ‘awarded’ as a prize to authoritarian states like the Soviet Union or China is political. The Olympics were political to the Greeks, and included diplomatic parleys among the poetry competitions and beauty parades. Nor were the actual games gentlemanly and decorous. Robin Lane Fox, in The Classical World, describes ‘smashed teeth, limbs, ears and bones, occasionally to the point of death’.
The revival of the games by Pierre de Coubertin in the 19th century was also political, albeit the facile politics of world peace and platitudes about the global fraternity of youth. There is no fraternity in international sport, which as Coubertin recognised is war by other means. Sportsmen are trained to beat hell out of each other to the greater glory of their country. All else is naivety. To those who might find a political Olympiad distasteful, there is a clear and simple alternative. They can treat the Olympics as only about sport, and not about world harmony and the enrichment of the construction industry. Athletes can attend the games as individuals. The tarnished Olympic image can be cleansed by suppressing national anthems, flags and all visits and speeches by politicians. The games would become solely about running, throwing, jumping, swimming, riding — active verbs, not abstract nouns. If that happened there would be no need of idle threats against China. There need be none of the political clutter that Rogge and others have brought to the Olympics, any more than there has been at this month’s world cycling and swimming championships in Manchester. They passed off without anyone mentioning Tibet. But they did not have to justify $30bn.

—Khaleej Times





Is West trying to revive the Cold War?
Hassan Tahsin

VLADMIR Putin decided not to run for another term as president of Russia paving the way for his protégé Dmitry Medvedev to succeed him. This does not mean he is no more interested in the future of the Rossiyskaya Federatsiya (the Russian Federation) which rose, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Soviet Union. As two-term president, Putin transformed Russia beyond recognition. Now Russia is a confident, resurgent power. For the last eight years, GDP has steadily increased, rising by the highest percentage of 8.1 percent since the fall of the Soviet Union. Inflation has fallen to under 10 percent, and Russia’s trade balance has increased threefold in four years.
Russians would, undoubtedly, remember Putin as a strong leader who rescued them from the anarchy that surfaced in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and reasserted the Russian identity. The outside challenges Putin had to counter were no less serious. The United States, which wanted a total surrender by Russia, applied varying degrees of pressures to guarantee that Moscow would never be back on its feet after the terrible decade of disintegration, rampant corruption and steady decline. The most threatening and humiliating of the US moves against Russia is a new European missile scheme that would include installation of US radars to spy on Russia. Reminiscent of the old Soviet adventures, Putin sent Russian scientists to explore the polar region and put the Russian flag deep in the ocean in the disputed Arctic region. It was a calculated move to reassert Russian stakes over the enormous energy reserves in the normally inaccessible region. More than 100 Russian scientists and geologists had a mission to find evidence to reinforce the mountain ranges in the ocean bed was a geographical extension of Russian territory providing valid grounds for the Russian claim.
The Western protests at the Russian attempt to ignite a conflict on the North Pole region was quite understandable. According to US experts, the Arctic region sits on top of the 25 percent of the oil and gas reserves in the world besides reserves of diamonds, platinum, manganese, nickel, tin and lead. In an apparent move to show the Western powers that he did not fear them, Putin launched a scheme of advanced long-range ballistic missiles. They included missiles that could be launched from sea, land and from the air. Russia also decided to station permanent fleets in the Mediterranean and other major oceans around the globe. Putin is also not ready to accept unilateral US decisions in matters related to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Russia recently warned that NATO was playing with fire if it intended to go ahead with the plan to admit its neighbors Georgia and Ukraine to the US-dominated alliance. The neoconservatives at White House believe that Putin was trying to revive the Cold War and thus play its historical role on world stage.
It is also not a secret that there are fundamental differences of opinion between Moscow and Washington on most sensitive international issues such as the independence of Kosovo and Iran’s nuclear projects besides the defense shield project in the Eastern Europe. Russia also does not approve of the continued US presence in Iraq or the NATO presence in Afghanistan besides the American meddling in the Central Asian republics. Their suspicion is not misplaced as Putin made it clear that he was determined to return Russia to its old glory, particularly after NATO backed the plan to install a US radar system in the Czech Republic to track ballistic missiles. Though Putin has stepped down as president, it does not mean that he would not come back after four years. In February 2007, Putin warned the US that some of its practices went beyond limits of toleration. Three months later in June he threatened to position the Russian missiles toward new European targets if the US went ahead with the Defense Shield project. One thing is certain: Putin would not remain a mute spectator if the Western powers attempt to sideline Russians.

—Arab News