China has passed a special program to promote social and economic development through the wider use of information technology, and a guideline on handling government affairs online.
They were passed Wednesday at a meeting presided over by Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji. Chinese Vice-President Hu Jintao, Vice-PremierLi Lanqing and other high-ranking government leaders also attended the meeting.
The documents were presented to the meeting by Zeng Peiyan, minister in charge of the State Development Planning Commission, but no concrete information on the documents was available.
The meeting called for more efforts to apply information technology in every field of social and economic development through improved IT infrastructure and better use of existing Internet resources and private investment.
The meeting stressed China should strive for a reliable, forward-looking national information network with the best possible structure, and for an open and rapidly-growing IT-related manufacturing sector.
It pointed out that governments at all levels should give full play to non-government investment and the role of the market mechanism in projects involving information resource development, construction of IT infrastructure, IT application and IT products.
The meeting also stressed the importance of software industry, calling for acceleration in the development of the industry.
(Xinhua News Agency July 5, 2002)
