It's no secret that expatriate Chinese students used fax machines to funnel information in and out of China during the 1989 democracy movement. Less well known is the fact that China's turmoil gave birth to what is now one of the most vigorous communities on the Internet. Mailing lists, newsgroups, and ftp archives proved to be superb methods for distributing information to the many far-flung pockets of "overseas" Chinese.
The most enduring cyberlegacy of the Tiananmen Square incident is the China News Digest, a web server (www.cnd.org)) and mailing list that routinely figures in the top 10 most popular listserv lists (see "Top 10," Wired 2.11, page 46). The Digest was started by a group of Canadian and American expatriate Chinese students to spread news about the Tiananmen demonstrations. Six years later, tens of thousands of subscribers receive a daily synopsis of news stories about China published in newspapers and magazines from all over the world.
One of the volunteers from the group that produced the Digest, James Ding, soon recognized that the Internet could be turned to different, more profitable uses. Along with other expatriate Chinese, Ding founded AsiaInfo Services Inc., in 1993, a joint venture with China's largest information retrieval company, Wanfang Data Corporation. AsiaInfo's original mission was to transmit - via the Internet - business-oriented information about China. But over the last six months, the company has become increasingly involved in getting China online.
"China has got Internet fever," says Edward Tian, AsiaInfo's president, in an e-mail message from Beijing, where he and Ding "are working like crazy to have many Chinese institutions linked to the Net."
AsiaInfo is also a "major" subcontractor for Sprint, which is setting up three leased 64-Kbps lines to the Internet in China. And with a content provider in the United States and a technology provider in China, AsiaInfo hopes to become a full-fledged online service provider.
These days, there's no shortage of companies with similar plans in Asia. Hong Kong alone has 10 Internet providers - six months ago, there were three.
But the real irony of the AsiaInfo case is that the same people who smuggled information out of China when the government was doing its utmost to stop them are now helping set up that same government with the most potent information-dispersal technology around. So far, they're being discreet, capitalizing on the observation that either Chinese leaders don't know enough about the Internet to fear it, or that they're so blinded by the economic need to upgrade telecommunications, they're ready to write blank checks.
SCANS
Asia.net
