The digital divide of PRC

Preface:
As my last blog’s main topic is the digital divide, and I had brought up several research questions. They are :
Ⅰ.What is the origin of the this term?
Ⅱ.What is the features or manifestation of it?
Ⅲ.Why & How people on earth try to close the digital divide?
Ⅳ.How about the digital divide in China?
As I am from mainland of China, so now I will focus on the digital divide of the mainland of China and current situation of Xinjiang.
The digital divide(Digital gap) also called the information gap, as what we have discussed before, refers to the gap between those with regular, effective access to digital and information technology, and those without it. In Chinese it is called “数字鸿沟 (shu zi hong gou)”.
It exists between different countries, different areas, different professions, and different crowds. Its essence is unfair assignment of information resource or knowledge.
Along with the Internet popularization and the information technology development, the digital divide which caused by the information technology development and application is presenting the magnified tendency, produced the Matthew effect (A phenomenon in specific circles whereby one's accomplishments and reputation tend to snowball, and those with meager accomplishments have greater difficulty achieving accomplishments. ). The digital divide has already seeped into people's economy, politics and social life, had the disparity by the information technology and the information welfare to urge the authority and individual status rapid change, the social gap between rich and poor is also expanding, they have become the social unstable suggestion factor, easy to cause the social contradiction and the conflict. The digital gap already became one of difficult problems which in the information age day by day prominent society question and the global scope urgent needed to solve. As the behalf of public interest, the government needs to carry on the government to the digital gap, strengthens to the information resource disposition.
The Chinese background:
The people’s republic of China (PRC) was founded on 1st, Oct 1949 by the great leader- Chairman Mao. It has a long history, profound culture, large area of 9.6 million square kilometers and a large population of more than 1.2 billion.
We are always proud of our large country and population, but on the other hand, it’s hard to manage so large a country like ours. We have paid much on exploring our own way of developing. We missed the boat of global information revolution while our people were desperately crazy about the great culture revolution during the late 1960s and 1970s which triggered the paralyzed economy.
Due to various mistakes the problem of digital divide was especially severe in China. As the largest developing country in the world, China faces a severe digital divide, which exists not only between China and developed countries, but also among its own regions and social groups. Like many other indicators of development, wide gaps exist between Chinese IT "haves and have nots." As “Information poverty”, China is facing the dual dropping variances: On the one hand is and between the developed country digitized disparity, on the other hand is digitized disparity between the domestic various regions.
According to the newest statistical data, between China and America's digital gap is as follows: Closure end of last year, Chinese computer capacity 15.90 million, with 88 computers per million people on average, ranking 8 th of the world; US 164.1 million, with 5000 computers per million people on average, winning first place of the world. It is 55 times larger than China. From the network popularity rate, the number of China's web users is equal to 1／8 of US’s. It is said that China falls behind US at least 40 Years. No wonder some people say the digital gap between China and developed country of world is alarmed.
Let’s look at the domestic disparity. The manifestations are as bellowing:
Because of the different level of economic development, local structure of talent, education, digital gap performance between regions is extremely obvious, such as city and countryside disparity and east mid-west area disparity.
（1) City and countryside disparity. Both of the Internet penetration coefficients of Chinese cities and the countryside are increasing, but the increase rate of the cities’ is much quicker compared to the countryside’s. According to the demonstration of Internet statistical report July,2006, the cities Internet penetration coefficient is 18%, but the countryside’s coefficient is only 3 %. The cities Internet penetration coefficient is 6 times as large as the countryside’s. It is estimated that in the future period, the city and countryside Internet development disparity possibly will continue to enlarge. The web users of cities’ middle school student are approximately 7.034 million, while the users of middle school student in countryside are only 3.793 million. Digital disparity between the city and countryside can be inferred.
（2) East mid-west area disparity. The distribution of information resources and the level of Internet development between east, mid and west are contrast, which take on the stepped distribution. Statistics indicated that, the website number of North China, East China, and South China's occupies 86.0% in all. While the proportion of northeast, southwest, and northwest China is approximately 11.5%.
North China, East China, South China's registration domain name accounts for 83.6% of the total. Northeast, southwest, northwest registration domain name accounts for the left part-14.0%. Compared to the end of 2005, the disparity enlarges rapidly.
Region Percentage of local population with internet access
Guangdong
19.9%
Shandong
12.2%
Jiangsu
13.7%
Zhejiang
19.9%
Sichuan
8.4%
Hebei
9.2%
Hubei
9.3%
Henan
5.5%
Fujian
14.6%
Shanghai
28.7%
Liaoning
11.4%
Beijing
30.4%
Hunan
6.4%
Shaanxi
10.6%
Shanxi
11.3%
Guangxi
8.0%
Heilongjiang
9.6%
Anhui
5.5%
Jiangxi
6.6%
Yunnan
6.2%
Jilin
10.0%
Tianjin
24.9%
Chongqing
7.9%
Inner Mongolia
6.7%
Xinjiang
7.7%
Gansu
5.9%
Guizhou
3.8%
Hainan
14.1%
Ningxia
7.0%
Qinghai
6.8%
Tibet
5.8%
Source: China Internet Network Information Center. "Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China". Jan, 2007.
Comparison of East/Middle/West in China internet development
.. Penetration Rate Domain Name Number/10,000 People Website Number/10,000 People
East 14.0% 44.5 12.2
Middle 6.5% 7.9 2.0
West 6.9% 8.2 1.8
Nation 9.4% 22.0 5.9
Source:China Internet Network Information Center. 18th "Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China". July, 2006
However, In fact, in its effort to empower the information industry and popularize telecommunications, China has made remarkable achievements. In 2002 on the 34th World Telecommunications Day, Chinese theme is "ICT for all: empowering people to cross the digital divide." (1) It showed the our strong decision of solving the problem. Over the past years there has been an explosion in the use of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in the People's Republic of China.
Since the implementation of China’s Tenth Five Year Plan (2001-2005), the PRC has stressed the importance of information technology in its economic development. There is an optimism within the government that the "Internet and information technology (IT) are crucial factors for building international economic competitiveness and overcoming interregional development gaps at home."[4] The plan classifies the building of an information society as key to China’s economic development and modernization, with the belief that the development of IT will naturally pull the economy in the least prosperous areas out of poverty.
Statistics show that the rate of telephone usage in the country has reached 26 percent and Internet surfers number 37.55 million.
China is an excellent example of a country where a strong desire to expand access to electronic information resources, combined with the unwavering assistance and presence of a database vendor, yielded dramatic results of a positive nature. The appetite and market for information in the People's Republic of China (PRC–defined here as just the Mainland) is growing, perhaps more so than anywhere else in Asia. This is not surprising given the recent acceptance of the PRC into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the experience witnessed in the other Chinese-speaking countries/territories of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Liberalization of the PRC economy has translated into liberalization of education. More importantly, the Chinese government recognizes the need for its students and researchers to compete globally and has greatly increased the amount of money spent by universities on computer and network infrastructure as well as databases.
Currently, more than three dozen major universities in the PRC are using EBSCO full-text databases. The majority of these universities access these databases through China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS), which is the largest and most well-known academic consortium in the country. CALIS includes the renowned Beijing and Tsing-Hua universities. In addition, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is also using EBSCO full-text databases. Many non-academic libraries are also expanding their resources to include these databases, such as the Shanghai and Shenzhen public libraries, and the Tianjin City medical board.
Over the next few years, universities in many of the lesser-developed provinces of China will also begin to access online full-text resources. For example, provincial consortia of academic libraries are now being formed by EBSCO and CALIS in Hunan, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. In addition, Tibetan libraries are expected to join either the Qinghai or existing Yunnan consortium. Previously, CALIS and EBSCO had established database consortia in twenty-one other provinces. This growth follows a common pattern where the expansion of digital resources begins first in more urban and “developed” regions of a country before slowly spreading into less developed areas.
Household broadband penetration in China stood at 13 per cent by December 2006. The steady broadband growth will push household penetration to 21 per cent by 2010, equivalent to 106 million subscribers, but this is nowhere near market potential. The lack of competition between the main operators is a major factor, because it keeps prices higher than necessary and hinders uptake. China's fixed line telecoms operators have been looking to broadband expansion to replace revenues lost to new technologies, such as mobile phones. However, weak broadband growth will mean shrinking revenues for these firms. Broadband firms have been advised to generate more revenue from content and to continue expanding their infrastructure in smaller cities. But disagreements between government regulators handling broadcasting and communications are slowing the growth of IPTV, one of the potential content services that can be offered over broadband.
It’s hard to achieve that everybody can own his or her own PC , but there is an unique form of accessing Internet in China is Net Bar which is pretty popular and convenient .Commonly, it is charged by hour when you use the bar’s computer. It is 2-5 RMB per hour and not too expensive.
Xinjiang bridge the digital divide:
Xinjiang is short for Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, which is located at the most north-western China. It has an area of 1.66 million square kilometers, which is one sixth of the whole China, and the population is about 20 million. Xinjiang has not only a complicated topography of plains, mountains, glaciers, oasis, grasslands, deserts etc, but also complex social and folk customs of 47 nations living here.
Learned from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region people's government office that, now people of all the nation or world who want to know the various information about Xinjiang and the policies, regulations, resources that stipulated by the prefectures of Xinjiang, also the politics, economy, culture , geography, news, folk customs and so on can get it easily as long as they click on the local government public website. This goal’s realization, benefits from the national significant informationization project “Reduction of digital divide——West moves” implementing smoothly in Xinjiang.
“Reduction of digital divide——West moves ” Managed by the State Council information, west develop management office and National Technical department, with the national high tech development plan (863 plans) supporting, is for the purpose of prompting the informationization development of the western area. The project started in October, 2002, the general goals were to provide the technical support for the western areas’ informationization. Through the experiment site and the demonstration, it enables the general western areas to obtain and to use more information, and informationization impetus industrialization, prompts western area to improve industrial structure and develop information industries, heighten informationization level of western area. At the first and next section, this project mainly focus on four aspects of the public information platform, the network education, the computer agriculture, and the manufacture informationization . It is important to prompt the application of domestic network computer (NC) and the product based on Linux Software.
Up to May, 2004, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region had completed this topic correlation software product development, personnel training and the majority of application demonstration point government public information website construction. At present, the autonomous region each application demonstration point all pressed the request to establish the professional electron government affairs operating mechanism, has provided the application technical management personnel. Connects Xinjiang and national and the world network has woven initially.
References:
(1) ICT-Information and Communication Technology
http://www.caigou2003.com/NewsCentral/Calling/IT/200408/20040831161000.html
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W63-4HGD78H1&_user=1495051&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000053173&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=1495051&md5=9f412ebb8119e097073e25bf47fe0c84
http://www.lianghui.org.cn/chinese/2002/Jul/180978.htm
http://www.lunwen58.com/Article_Show.asp?ArticleID=4782
http://www.chinadv.com/tech/59891/
The Digital Divide: Lessons from the People’s Republic of China Dr. Jonathan Harrington; Troy State University
Bridging the Within-Country Digital Divide in Education: Improving Education in Western China through Innovative Use of ICTs Zhou Nan-zhao; Chief of APEID, UNESCO
Distance learning project bridges the digital divide in China Rong Jiaojiao; UNICEF - China

Closing the digital divide-Transforming regional economies and communities with information technology Edited by Stewart Marshall, Wallace Taylor, and Xinghuo Yu
Learning to bridge the digital divide Organization for economic co-operation and development
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