China is a rapidly developing country which is undergoing profound changes with respect to the growth and operation of its economic system. As part of this development it is attempting to build its information technology and telecommunications industries and the exploitation of computer software, data processing, online services and network building has increased rapidly over the last ten years or so. In 1992 the Chinese government produced a document (Decision to Strengthen the Development of the Service Industry), which set out its intention to develop information services and consultancies as rapidly as possible. This was followed up in 1993 by the establishment of the Joint Conference on the National Economic Development of Information Technology and subsequent production of the Programme on the Development of China’s National Information Infrastructure. This emphasis by China on the development of its own information industry, an area which is one of the fastest moving industries on the planet, has required its extensive involvement and co‐operation with foreign national and international initiatives, and one of its problems has been to make contacts abroad and advertise its own initiatives. As a contribution to this work the British Council, China, commissioned China On‐line Technology to compile this guide which is intended to give a short overview of the Chinese information industry as a whole and to list the major information and consultancy services available in the country.
The major part of the report first discusses China’s national information infrastructure and the growth of information technology in the national economy before presenting the results of a survey of the information industry. This survey considers computer software and services, database services, consultancies, electronic publishing, online services and the Internet. The sections on the administrative institutions, policies and regulations that affect the information industry are interesting, not so much for what they do say as for what they do not. It is well known, for example, that there is considerable state control and monitoring over who has use of or access to computers that are networked internationally (though personal access to the Internet has been allowed since 1995), but this topic is carefully avoided. The reader is referred to a mass of documentation but is given very little feel for the real content of this. Instead, there is a grand sounding selection of aims and objectives of the sort familiar to any academic involved in writing a course document that tries to satisfy the validators with its high sounding ideals while simultaneously attempting to be sufficiently vague as to allow the academics freedom of action to do their own thing. In this case one gets the feeling that the “validators” are the critical Western countries urging freedom of information and the “academic” is the Chinese government which is determined to maintain a much greater degree of control than would be acceptable elsewhere.
The report concludes with a series of five Appendices which collectively present a directory of major information and consultancy services. The lists are not in alphabetical order which is rather annoying, and are somewhat confusing because a distinction has been made between institutions in China (all with addresses in Beijing) and those in Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai which each have a separate listing. Possibly the former are considered to have a national responsibility while the latter are local or regional only but this is certainly not clear from the names of the organizations. If anyone has, or is attempting to, set up closer electronic links with China, or wishes to obtain information about China, whether in science, engineering, information technology, management, economic or social research, this report will be exceedingly useful in supplying contact addresses and giving some sort of a feel for the approach that China is making towards developing its information industry. It could well also be of interest to those who wish to market IT equipment to what is the most rapidly growing economy in the world.
