Wu said the revision aims to realize the national treatment for overseas enterprises running business in China and create a fair, open and just environment for information industry players from home and abroad.

In the last year, he said, he signed as many as 18 regulations which stipulated specific measures covering wide-range of fields, such as bidding for telecommunications projects and use of code resources, thus enriching and improving regulations on telecommunications.

Looking ahead, he said the future law on telecommunications will be based on these regulations, incorporating practical experience, development of new technology and experience of foreign countries.

"We gradually amend and revise various telecommunications regulations according to practice," he said, stressing that "the ministry is gearing up for the early enacting of the law on telecommunications."

He said in the past two years, the information industry ministry has enhanced the supervision of the enterprises in the trade, and the promulgation of the regulation on telecommunication has set the rules for introducing competition in the trade and consequently various work in the trade had a rule to abide by.

Wu was delighted with the rapid and healthy development of the information industry in 2001. He said the information industry remained the number one industry in China with the output reaching 1,350 billion yuan (US$162.65 billion), sales standing at 750 billion yuan, and taxes the industry paid reaching 65 billion yuan.

Although the world economy slowed last year, China's exports of electronic and information products hit US$60 billion, a minor increase compared with the year 2000, he noted.

Statistics show that the business volume of the telecommunications sector in China stood at 366.9 billion yuan and the investment in the trade reached some 200 billion yuan.

By the end of last November, the number of fixed telephone subscribers in China reached 177 million, second to that of the United States. Mobile phone users, however, totaled 140 million, ranking first worldwide, and the Internet users in China totaled 15.91 million.

(China Daily January 9, 2002)