Starting in late March, the training campaign will take three to five years to ultimately help one million urban residents, women aged 35 to 60 in particular, to command some basic IT knowledge and to skillfully use computers, TV set-top boxes and other IT devices related to their daily lives.

This will enable these residents to adapt themselves well to an IT-based society and improve the quality of their digitized lives, and they in turn will educate their families, according to the popularization scheme.

Urban computerization is an important development strategy of Shanghai, according to Mayor Han Zheng.

In accordance with its plan, Shanghai will initially build a basic framework to become a "Digital City" in 2007. Similar to government and corporate computerization, household digitizing is also an important part of efforts to digitize the city, according to Han.

Shanghai is now encouraging its citizens, volunteers and training institutions and enterprises concerned to participate in the IT popularization campaign.

By the end of 2002, Shanghai had 4.2 million netizens, with an Internet service popularization rate of 32 percent, and had 350, 000 subscribers of broadband connection services, with a popularization rate of more than 7 percent, according to authoritative statistics.

(eastday.com March 31, 2003)