ABSTRACT
For several months, The Friends of Nature (FON), a Beijing-based environmental group, had been campaigning to save the Golden Monkey, which was disappearing along with its natural habitat, the virgin forests in southwestern Yunnan province. FON wrote letters to press Beijing's policy-makers to stop logging in Yunnan's Deqing County. When FON members visited Deqing posing as investors, they found that logging continued. They coaxed "Jiaodian Fangtan" ("Focal Point"), a 13-minute prime-time investigative newsmagazine broadcast daily by China Central Television (CCTV), to send a crew to document the deforestation. Since China four years ago plugged into the yingtewang, as the Internet is known, more than 1.2 million Chinese have access to the Net, a number that is projected to grow to 5 million by 2000. Recent trends point to increasing use of Chinese language on the Net, showing that even those who are not proficient in foreign languages can now tap into it.
