Page 71 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 3. Contextual Background

2001-02 China Telecom began to provide the internet-based international
roaming service.
2001-12-03 CNNIC issued the first ‘Survey Report on internet Bandwidth in Chi-
na’.
2001-12-22 China Unicom declared that the first-stage construction of the CDMA
mobile communication network of China Unicom had been completed.
The building-up of the CDMA network indicated that the development
of the mobile communication technology of China had entered a new
field.
2002-05-17 China Mobile took the lead in officially launching the GPRS service
nationwide.

The Growing Stage
2003-03-20 Sun Zhigang, a young man from Hubei Province, was detained and beat-
en to death in Guangzhou. After this incident was first exposed by the
local newspaper, the major network media in China intervened actively,
and wide attention was drawn from the society. The internet brought
into play its powerful role in media supervision and urged relevant
departments to solve this case.
2005-08-11 Yahoo announced to transfer all business operations of Yahoo China to
Alibaba.com. This was the first case for a global internet giant giving
all of its China’s business to a local company.
2005-11-07 Beijing Olympic Organising Committee announced that Sohu.com
became the internet content service sponsor of Beijing 2008 Olympic
Games. It is the first time that the internet content service is set to be
one of the sponsored items in the history of Olympic Games.
2005 Blogs and attached concept of Web 2.0 promoted tremendous develop-
ment of China’s internet. The emerging concept of Web 2.0 marked the
beginning of a new evolution stage of new media on the internet. As it
was widely used, there also emerged a series of socialized applications
such as Blog, RSS, WIKI, and Social Networking Sites, etc.
2006-01-01 Website of the Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic
of China (www.gov.cn) was formally launched. This website is a com-
posite platform for the State Council and its departments, along with peo-
ple’s governments of each province, autonomous region and municipality
to release information of governmental affairs on the internet and provide
online services.
2006-08 Investigation Report of China Blogs in 2006 issued by CNNIC shows
that till August 2006, blog authors have increased to 17,485,000.
2007-02-28 People’s Daily, the largest comprehensive print media and the newspaper
of the CPC central government, formally issued mobile phone newspa-
pers all over the country. It became a landmark event in the integra-
tion of modern communication technology and news media.

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