When talking about something about past difficulties in making a phone call must sound like recounting an impossible old story to young people in China today as they have gotten themselves used to a life surfing online and going on fixed and mobile phones.
A life that seems impossible, it has all come true. Since the 4th Plenary Session of the 4th CPC National Congress, information industry has gained the speediest development in China. There are already no difficulties to speak of when or whenever people want to get on a phone to his dearest in today's China now with the largest number of phones on line and air.
By the end of July this year, over 200 million fixed and near 200 million mobile phones users have been reported putting China atop the world, with a popularization rate of over 30 percent.
The great changes made in people's communications in China just tell one side of various successes made in advancing China's communications work. Over the past 13 years, spectacular advances have been reported in China's information industry. A pillar industry, it has helped push China's economic growth.
Up to 2001, information industry had come to fetch a 4.2 percent added value of China's total industrial earning. Communications and electronic industrial products had come to earn a yearly sales income of as much as 1.26 trillion yuan.
TV sets, laser video-visual products (CVD, DVD) and suchlike consumption products have been developed on an ever enlarged scale with an output on the world top list. Take color TV sets, over 4297 sets were produced in 2001 representing a 1.6-fold growth over 1989, near 100 times over 1978.
A most vigorous growth has all the more been seen in communications, IT and CP manufacture first launched in 1989 and these even had nothing to speak of early back in 1978. Take the manufacture of programming exchanges, these had first wholly depended on foreign imports and having been made an export item on a large scale has just been a thing developed during the past 13 years since 1989.
Again take mini CP for example, before 1989, imports had been the mere product dominating China's CP market. When it came to 2001, 7.58 million mini CPs were self-reliantly produced in the way China has come with a mini PC manufacturing output in two days today exceed that of a whole year's in 1989.
The above shows that by taking its place among the world biggest producers of like products China has come to make much headway in such fields of core technologies as integrated circuits and software products. In 2001, China produced a total of 5.483 billion pieces of integrated circuits, 50 times over 1989. Software yielded an annual income of 75 billion yuan (US$9.1 billion), registering a 34 percent growth.
Building a massive Internet has also been a new emerging industry developed in China in recent years. In 2001, surfers numbered over 33.70 million. Back in 1989, things with these had been totally a blank and there were merely 620,000 users registered up to 1997.
(People's Daily October 18, 2002)
