The boundary, consisting of various government-sponsored efforts to exercise cyber monitoring or limiting, aims to find and sanction vicious Internet-based activities which are harmful to China and its people's interests, said Hu Mingzeng, director of the Computer Network and System Security Research Center at Harbin Industrial University in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province.

While recognizing that the Internet can significantly promote China's social progress and connection to the outside world, the government is also paying more and more attention to criminal acts and other minor wrongdoings that it brings about, said Hu.

Dubbed "a message splitting the Great Wall", China's first electronic message was sent abroad via the Internet in 1987, followed by nationwide connection in 1994.

The latest statistics from the China Network Information Center show that by late 2002 there were 59.1 million Internet users across the country.

A survey by Web Side Story, a US-based Internet analysis organization, revealed that China's huge information transport via the Internet has made it the second world cyber power after the United States.

However, some of its innate characteristics, such as real-time, cheapness, anonymity and wide access, have made the Internet a seedbed for illegal activities. In China, more than 80 percent of all personal computers have suffered virus attacks or hacker invasions, causing a loss to its financial industry of more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) every year.

To date, China has enacted more than ten national or local laws and regulations which specify information protection as an obligation of network operators, information providers and connected users.

According to these laws, Net-based acts, including gambling, spreading pornography, unauthorized logging-in, fraud, tip-offs of state secrets, terrorism and government subversion, would be followed up and those who commit such acts would be fined or sent to prison.

China has established a special cyber police force to intensify real-time monitoring, to intercept and delete harmful information and to capture and check illegal server data.

Heilongjiang's law enforcement departments are ready to gradually bring the increasingly diversified wrongdoings into their jurisdiction, said Li Shilin, a provincial police officer responsible for supervising network security.

Technological support plays an essential role in achieving such goals, said Hu, adding that the existing technological system is competent for accomplishing related security missions.

Hardware and software solutions can help Internet police monitor and collect evidence, namely by observing keyboard clicking, tracing the wrongdoers, sounding the early alert and carrying out special tasks, according to Hu.

The privacy of common people is totally out of said scope, said Juris Yu Ning from Jilin University, in Heilongjiang's southern neighboring province.

"It simply functions against wrongdoing," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency April 2, 2003)