About four years ago, after many years at MIT, I went back to China with two suitcases. Then, there were about 3,000 Internet users in Beijing, China, and I spent half a day to get Internet access, providing the identification necessary and completing a very lengthy registration. At that time, China was still in the Internet Dark Age. Now, China has about 10 million Internet users and everybody is talking about the Internet.

In the past few years, we have come a long way. I wanted to start an Internet company and was trying to raise some capital. But nobody in China understood what venture capital was, so I had to come back to the U.S. to find money. Fortunately, some of my former colleagues at MIT, including Professor Ed Roberts and Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the media lab, provided the seed capital. We started the company, Internet Technologies China, which launched Sohu.com. Later ITC was renamed Sohu.com.

In the past few years, we have been able to persuade Beijing Telecom to allow us to put our first server into China's Internet infrastructure. The whole society had already accepted the Internet content provider concept and the advertising model. We introduced the first advertisement on the Internet in China, the first search directories and the concept of venture capital. We have been the main concept leader and educator regarding the Internet in China.

Four years ago, I was the only person going back to China to start an Internet company. Now, probably 10,000 overseas students have returned to China to start dot-coms. If you go to the universities and ask Chinese overseas students what they want to do after graduation, probably 80 percent of them will say they want to start a dot-com company.

The 10 million people using the Internet in China today will probably grow to 20 or 30 million within a year. There are between 50 and 100 million pages downloaded in China everyday. Sohu.com alone gets 10 million hits per day. And when we add up all the portal sites, you reach something like 100 million pages downloaded. By comparison, Yahoo has 300 million per day. So Internet use in China is quite significant compared to a few years ago.

The Internet may be the quickest portal into a billion-person emerging economy.

The Internet has become very hot and very popular, not only with the students and with the dot-com companies, but with the traditional media. Every newspaper has a dot-com IT section talking about the Internet. In other words -- China has come a long way.

What does this mean for China? What is the impact of the Internet on China? I believe that the Internet is really about choices. Before we had the Internet, Chinese people had limited access to information. After the Internet, there has been a quantum leap in terms of the amount of information that people can access. Through the Internet, you can read over 70 newspapers throughout China. You can find out which city is the most polluted when planning where you want to live. If you travel, you can find out which airline has the safest record. With information, you have the ability to decide things. March 15th in China is called the Day of the Rights of Consumers. Now, if you buy something that you are not happy with, you can easily find alternative providers, and the Internet facilitates this.

The Internet, of course, also provides more information about different political agendas. But really, it is about people becoming more informed about everything -- what to buy, where to live, who to do business with and so on. In the daily life of the Chinese people, the Internet is all about the right of choice on a very large scale. The result is the whole society, both the government and individuals, becoming more informed and able to discuss things. And the whole society just becomes more intelligent. So the national I.Q. has jumped significantly, and this is just the beginning.

In China today, there is not only the proliferation of the Internet sites and users but also a very important trend of decentralization. A market economy is forming. And in learning to work in a market economy, we must compress everything that has happened in the West in the last 50 years into a few short years.

So, with both decentralization and Internet development compressed in such a short period of time, there is a steep learning curve for the government, officials and businesses. It is only by proactive, constructive working together that we can make things happen. One example is how we persuaded Beijing Telecom to put up an Internet server. They wanted to organize it the old "central planning way." They would have organized all the content on the server in Beijing and would have ordered everyone to put up this or that information. We persuaded them that this was not the way to build it. You have to rely on the society for the content and allow people to create it their own way. You have to rely on many, many companies backed by venture capital to build the site and to build many sites. After a lot of discussion, they said, "Okay, Charles, maybe you know. We will give it a try. You can put your server there."

That is the first server we put on Beijing Telecom, later followed by many, many servers by different companies. And Beijing Telecom's infrastructure became the largest server farm in China, hosting all the major portals. Now, private businesses are building sites instead of Beijing Telecom allowing only one central commission to build content for people to read.

This is definitely a constructive process. We worked with the government and persuaded them. We realized that we have to really work together with the government to accelerate this learning process. By working together and by proactively cooperating, it will be possible to create a legal infrastructure and to understand different issues. China is in a major transition and that transition is not that easy. It is not just building things like skyscrapers in Beijing and Shanghai, but also changing the mentality of the media. We are trying to embrace all these new things in a few years. And the only way to succeed is by constructively working together.

For the original, pls clickhttp://www.govtech.net/magazine/visions/aug00vision/China/index.php

(For more biz stories, please visit Industry Updates)