China's state-coordinated Internet infrastructure

continues to evolve, has given China's Internet its special local character. The government therefore has allowed some competition to develop between domestic ISPs while making sure the infrastructure itself stays securely under its control. The key to this Internet strategy is to restrict the number of organizations that can interconnect with the global Inter-net. These restrictions have so far not seemed to limit deployment of Internet infrastructure. Instead, China's state-coordinated Internet infrastructure is making possible the rapid integration of the Internet throughout Chinese society. Besides being geographically vast, China is culturally and ethnically diverse. With 1.2 billion people, it is home to 20% of the world's population, and many of its provinces have more people than most Euro-pean countries. The number of Internet users in China has more than tripled, from 620,000 in Octo-ber 1997 to 2.1 million in December 1998 [4]. The Chinese leadership has allowed the Internet to grow so rapidly because they view it as an essential tool for economic prosperity, the harbinger of a " knowledge economy, " in which information flows replace industrial processes as the basis for the economy. For the past 10 years, China's economy has grown rapidly, with many sectors, such as telecommunications , growing at annual rates of 30%–50%. Each year, about 10 million phone lines are added to the public network. However, China remains an agricultural society with only the eastern provinces heavily industrialized. China's leaders hope to skip some classic intermediate stages of economic development as they encourage the integration of information technology. Information infrastructure contributes to economic expansion in developing as well as developed countries. There is evidence of a positive correlation between telecommunications infrastructure and economic growth around the world [10]. However, information infrastructure influences social, political, and cultural factors, as well as the economy. These In 1995, as the use of the Internet began to spread through many sectors of Chinese society, the country's leaders had to decide whether to allow this new medium to keep spreading and, if so, how to control it. Even though the technology itself allows decentralized coordination, the leadership chose to implement a hierarchy of responsibility to manage its growth. They hoped the Internet would unleash economic gains without destabilizing the country. Unlike the U.S., where the Internet has blossomed with no central control or central planning, various ministries of the Chinese central government have coordinated decision making while leaving room …