Wu Jichuan, China's minister of information industry, said at the International Telecommunication Union ITU Telecom Asia that in the present world, the digital divide between developing and developed countries is continuously widening, seriously undermining the healthy development of the world economy.

"In our opinion, the information network is a global issue and every country, especially developed countries, bears the responsibility to take measures and make effective efforts to narrow the divide," said Wu.

Wu pledged that China will further strengthen cooperation in various forms with countries in Asia and the world as a whole, absorb advanced technologies, import more foreign capital and learn other countries' experiences in management.

"We will, in a more opening-up gesture, actively take part in international competition and join hands with other countries in pushing ahead the development of the info-communication industry and embrace the arrival of the information era of the 21st century," Wu said.

As for telecom development in China, Wu said that thanks to the support and importance given by the government, China's info-communication industry has achieved eye-catching progress. Since the 1990s, he said, the growth of China's telecommunication industry has outpaced that of the GDP by 20 to 30 percentage points.

Up to September this year, users of fixed-line and mobile telephones in China had exceeded 200 million and the penetration rate of fixed-line and mobile phone users had ranked number 2 in the world, with an 11-percent penetration rate of the fixed-line users and a 5.5-percent penetration rate of mobile phone users, according to Wu.

Users of the Internet in China also had reached more than 20 million and information applications and services such as e-commerce, e-media, distance education and e-health are all developing rapidly, said Wu.

Meanwhile, reforms of China's info-communications have also accelerated, Wu said, noting that the monopoly in all telecom fields, including basic telecommunications, value-added telecommunications and info-communications has been broken and a market competition mechanism is in place.

Wu predicted that the info-communication industry of China will grow by more than 20 percent over the next five years and the telecom market will double its current scale in five years.

He unveiled China's strategy for the new century, including speeding up construction of a new-generation info-communication network, reviving product manufacturing and the software industry, developing the information service industry and further transforming the government's role in the development of the telecom industry.

(People's Daily 12/05/2000)