John Hughes
The Chinese economy is growing fast according to figures released at the end of last week. Over the eleven years to 1989, China's GDP grew by 9.5% each year. Based on the 11 years since then, China has maintained a 9.3% of growth rate. China has kept the fastest economic growth in the world irrespective of the adverse global economic environment, which is regarded a miracle by international community.
Over the last couple of years, China has been sucked further and further into the Global economic maze that is e-commerce. This has caused an ideological nightmare for the Maoist government made famous for book-burning and carefully control civil liberties. Chinese web-users have been gaining massive increases in freedom of information over their technologically impaired compatriots, and the Chinese authorities have recently begun to act.In June, a serious fire at an internet café in Beijing, started by two teenage boys, and killing 24 people, triggered the authorities to impose tough new regulations on the running of such establishments. Internet cafes all had their licences revoked and in order to be re-licensed they were made not only to ensure adequate fire safety procedures, but also to agree to strict web-filtering techniques. Those that failed to agree also failed to gain their licences. Of 2,400 or so closed down originally, only 30 or so have since re-opened.
Chinese authorities have spent this summer clamping down on internet supervision, at first on domestic sites, and more recently filtering out content from many of the World's top internet sites, including Google, AltaVista, and news sites such as BBC.co.uk, and CNN.com.
Sure, human rights campaigners have voiced serious concerns, but now their voices are being joined by China's traditionally right-wing economists are speaking out also.
Ken DeWoksin, a partner at accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers in Beijing, says, "You have a lot of talent, not to mention money, that is being directed into controlling rather than stimulating the use of the web... It's like an enormous tax in terms of time and cost that is introduced into the use of the internet for research... everything is just slow as molasses."
It seems the view is that such censorship can only harm the growth in GDP that China expects by increasing its ecommerce sector. The Chinese leadership has announced it expects the IT sector to increase its share of the countries GDP to 5% by 2005. Analysts say that even without the censorship, 3% is more feasible.
As long ago as March 2000, Song Ling, director general of the Ministry of Information Industry's Department of Information and Promotion said "Economic development will be the strategic measure for China to meet the global challenge," She described e-commerce as so critical to China's future that it will "guide the reconstruction of China's economy into a market-based system, eliminating some remaining structures of the planned economy."
It seems now that China's crisis of confidence in the Web may slow this integration with the World economy. If China really does believe in the power of ecommerce, will this finally bring down the now infamous "Great Firewall of China?"
