ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s, Internet use in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has grown at a tremendous pace. As of the middle of 2004, statistics show there were 87 million Chinese with online access. Over the past five years, the country’s international data bandwidth has expanded by a factor of more than 200. To a great extent, the Chinese government deserves praise for rapidly building the data network and seeing that access is being granted to a quickly expanding number of the country’s population. The struggle for control of cyberspace information, physical data pipelines, and network revenue, however, will have a significant effect on the network’s growth into the coming decade. The evolving demographics of Internet users and ways information is transferred within Chinese society is also shaping government attitudes toward regulation of the data highway.
