Chinese authorities are showing renewed enthusiasm for the Internet and its commercial possibilities

Shanghai is to become a key Asia-Pacific telecom hub with an Internet-based economy by 2010, according to the city's leaders.

This marks one of the few statements by China's leaders showing strong enthusiasm for the Internet. Most of the country's high-tech is in manufacturing hardware, not software, and authorities have installed one of the strictest Internet filters in the world.

Accordingly, the Shanghai report places more emphasis the development of e-citizen services than on providing access to information.

The eight-year roadmap for the city's high-tech future was recently laid out by city authorities, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

The plan included milestones, among them that by 2005, the Internet penetration rate in the city should reach 50 percent. Currently, less than six percent of the China's 1.3 billion citizens have Internet access.

The Xinhua report states that by 2005, residents should also "spend 10 percent of income on information services", possibly referring paid content such as video-on-demand.

Also, the city government would provide 90 percent of its services over the Web by that date. By 2007, a new city-wide data network should be in place.

Among the advantages the city had were that it had no older IT structure, so it could leap ahead with the latest technology, said a senior city official in the report. Shanghai was also more technologically advanced that other large Chinese cities, he observed.

The report noted that Shanghai already had a strong base for growth as an IT hub. In the first half of this year, the IT industry made up 10 percent of the city's gross domestic product, compared with 5.3 percent in 1997. One-third of foreign investment into the city was for IT and local IT firms contributed one-fifth of the city's export revenues last year, said the Xinhua report.

The city has China's most urbanised citizens, and with its 15 million residents, dwarfs many Asian countries in population.

China had 68 million Internet users as of the end of June. Those connecting via dial-up accounted for 45 percent of total users, while broadband Internet users reached 9.8 million, a significant rise from 6.6 million six months ago, according to official statistics.

China is one of the fastest growing Internet markets. According to market measurement firm Nielsen/Netratings, user numbers are doubling every 12 to 18 months. As of April last year, China was second only to the US in the number of citizens who go online, followed by Japan, Germany and the UK.

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