These are statistics from the ongoing national working conference on economic information systems. Since the 9th Five-Year Plan period China's informationization level has been greatly lifted up, with the scales of both fixed and mobile communication networks next only to the United States. In this period China's whole value for communication business reached 400bn yuan to show a yearly increase of 33 percent. The market for basic telecom business dominated long by China Telecom has been opened to various telecom developers. After reorganization of China Telecom fresh progress has been made in the reform of telecom administration systems, with a batch of new developers as China Netcom, China Railway Telecom inaugurated to form an open market competition.

Progress has been made in some key fields of electric information products, whose growth rates in production and export are much higher than those of traditional industries. The industrial output for manufacturing of electric information products exceeded 1000bn yuan with a yearly growth of over 30 percent on average. Export value for electric information products reached US$50bn to show a yearly increase of 25 percent on average. Meanwhile, the popularization and application of information technologies are more closely linked with the restructure of traditional industries, with more and more Chinese websites cropping up.

Besides, a series of regulations and laws were also mapped out for a better information environment, such as Some Measures to Further Encourage Development of Software and IC Industries, Telecom Regulations of PRC and Regulations on Internet Administration.

(People's Daily 04/05/2001)