ABSTRACT
Internet cafés have been developing rapidly in China since the end of the twentieth century as a result of the global breakthroughs in information technology. This is an area where the technological gap is quite small between China as a developing country and the developed countries in the West. However, the gap in the number of Internet surfers is extremely wide. After the first Internet café in the world came into being in Britain in 1994, the business sites of Internet access services began to mushroom in China. Incomplete statistics indicate that, by early 2002, there were a total of 200,000 Internet cafés across China, with less than half being legally registered. Beijing had 2,992 Internet cafés. While only seventy of them had the required certificates and licences, 889 had only certificates or licences and 2,033 had neither certificates nor licences. Internet café administration (especially the administration of illegal Internet cafés) has rapidly become a major social problem that the competent government departments have to solve as soon as possible.
