China To Relax Net Legislation
Martin Burns
Member info
User since: 26 Apr 1999
Articles written: 143
China's information minister, Wu Jichuan, is set to relax the government's attitude to foreign investment in the Internet.
Foreign companies are not currently allowed to invest in Chinese ISPs or content providers, but according to the latest reports, Jichuan has hinted that the government could change its regulations by Christmas.
The move marks a distinct softening of the minister's previous hard-line approach to the potential influx of foreign cash. Only last month, he said such investment would be treated as illegal.
In a speech at the end of last month, the minister also claimed the size of China's Internet community is set to rise from four million today to at least 20 million by 2003.
Martin Burns has been doing this stuff since Netscape 1.0 days. Starting with the communication ends that online media support, he moved back through design, HTML and server-side code. Then he got into running the whole show. These days he's working for these people as a Project Manager, and still thinks (nearly 6 years on) it's a hell of a lot better than working for a dot-com. In his Copious Free Time™, he helps out running a Cloth Nappies online store.
Amongst his favourite things is Zope
He's been a member of evolt.org since the very early days, a board member, a president, a writer and even contributed a modest amount of template code for the current site. Above all, he likes evolt.org to do things because it knowingly chooses to do so, rather than randomly stumbling into them. He's also one of the boys and girls who beervolts in the UK, although the arrival of small children in his life have knocked the frequency for 6.
Most likely to ask: Why would a client pay you to do that?
Least likely to ask: Why isn't that navigation frame in Flash?
