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01/26/1998 Suicidal Tendencies
Researchers aren't sure why, but people in China have taken to killing themselves at an alarming rate
01/12/1998 China Gets Wired
Sure, the censors still block some Websites, but Beijing officials now agree that economic progress depends on access to the Internet

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Suicidal Tendencies
Researchers aren't sure why, but people in China have taken to killing themselves at an alarming rate

By BRUCE W. NELAN

January 26, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 3

he nurturing love suicide prevention Center was the first of its kind in China. Since opening its doors in the southern metropolis of Guangzhou almost 10 years ago, the center and its founder, Chen Yunqing, have been credited with saving several hundred people who otherwise would have killed themselves. Inevitably there have been some tragic failures as well, and among them was Chen. He hanged himself last September at the age of 53, leaving no suicide note. His puzzling death set off an intense round of debate and public introspection. Why would a successful man like Chen do such a thing? The Beijing Youth Daily concluded that he must have been depressed, observing that "a suicide expert cannot resist depression any more than a heart specialist can resist heart problems."

The paper went on to provide some startling estimates. Every day, it said, 560 Chinese end their own lives. "The number of suicides in China," the Youth Daily reported, "makes up a third of the world's total." Both the calculation and its publication are eye-popping and the real figures are probably higher. Suicide is still a politically sensitive topic in China, and it is often reported as accidental death. As a result, there are no reliable figures. But estimates and research results suggest that China has one of the world's highest suicide rates, perhaps two or even three times the international average. Researchers are scrambling to find out why.

A 1995 World Mental Health Report put the overall suicide rate in China at 17.1 per 100,000 people, among the highest in the world (Hungary ranked No. 1). Last year a study by the World Bank, the World Health Organization and Harvard University put the rate at 30.3 per 100,000, compared with 10.7 for the rest of the world. That study estimates that China, with 21.5% of the world's population, accounts for a staggering 43.6% of the 786,000 suicides worldwide. Allowing for some of those officially listed as accidents, the study suggests that more than 300,000 Chinese kill themselves every year. In any case, says Michael Phillips, a Canadian researcher at Beijing's Hui Long Guan Hospital, "We're talking about pretty darn big numbers. It's a huge health problem."

Particularly for women. China is the only country in which more women than men kill themselves, and by a huge margin. About 21% of the world's females live in China, yet 55.8% of the women who commit suicide worldwide are Chinese. "That's a phenomenal statistic," says Phillips. Across the land, women have fewer opportunities and lower status than men, and that is particularly true in the countryside. "In some rural communities, there is a sense that suicide is almost a normal response to certain types of stress," says Phillips. A significant number of suicides among rural women, studies have found, are impulsive acts, often in reaction to family conflicts over money or infidelity. Xie Lihua, editor of Rural Women Knowing All, a monthly magazine that runs a column on suicide in the countryside, says that 60% or more of such cases seem to be related to family problems and the women's sense of being trapped in lives with little value except for childbearing. "They see no alternatives," she says. "They can't find solutions to their problems."

Is that what accounts for the propensity of Chinese, male and female, to end their own lives? Phillips has been working for a year and a half with Yang Gonghuan of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine in an effort to find out. One thing they have learned: elderly Chinese are committing suicide in increasing numbers. Those deaths seem related to a breakdown in the country's health-care system and the rising cost of medical treatment. Rather than burden their families with expenses and worry, the old folks decide to end it.

The Chinese government is becoming increasingly open about the suicide problem but has not yet done much to solve it. The mental-health system is geared toward treating severe disorders like schizophrenia. Funds are short, so there is only limited research on the causes of suicide. Because of low salaries and high stress, few doctors choose to go into the mental-health field. That means severely depressed patients, especially those outside the big cities, often go without treatment.

Yet such conditions prevail in developing countries that have far fewer suicides. China's high rate can't be fully explained by poverty, poor public health or the low status of women either, because many other parts of the world suffer from those problems too. Indeed, China has enjoyed high economic growth for years, and so far it has largely escaped the financial woes that have hit its Asian neighbors. Is the condition a cultural anomaly in China, which historians say has long had a relatively high suicide rate? "Maybe," says Phillips. He hopes he will find some answers as he and Yang expand their research effort from three localities to 21. Meanwhile, the World Bank predicts that suicides in China will reach 534,000 a year by 2020.

Reported by Mia Turner/Beijing

From Time Magazine

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China Gets Wired
Sure, the censors still block some Websites, but Beijing officials now agree that economic progress depends on access to the Internet

By JOSHUA COOPER RAMO /BEIJING

JANUARY 12, 1998 VOL. 151 NO. 1

It is a narrow room, a meter and a half wide, decorated with the awkward minimalism that passes for modern chic in the still-communist world: peeling white paint, tilting buffet tables, schoolroom chairs bolted together into haphazard couches. The attraction here isn't the decor. It's the machines--a beige Compaq Proliant 2500 computer and an off-white Dell Poweredge-- hooked into a refrigerator-size rack of network routers, and from there, via a thumb-thick black cable, to the infinite abundance of the Internet. Edward Zeng, the 35-year-old Chinese entrepreneur who commands this tiny outpost in the battle for information freedom, can't resist a grin as he looks around the modest but astonishing room, buried in a warren of offices in the bunker-like hallways under Beijing's Capital Stadium. As state-sponsored basketball and badminton teams practice overhead, Zeng fondles one of his purring servers and ponders an altogether more dramatic kind of game. "Welcome to ground zero," he says.

There is very little you cannot have from Zeng's little room: Tibetan freedom Websites, raunchy Danish porn, headlines from the New York Times. Zeng's 1,000 Internet subscribers can dial in to his computers from all over Beijing and connect nearly limitlessly to the electronic world. They can send E-mail, photos and news of China. And they can receive practically anything else. When the government blocks a Website, as it still is wont to do from time to time, Zeng's customers surf elsewhere. Is reuters.com jammed? They can jump to washingtonpost.com. At night, hundreds of Chinese who don't own a PC crowd into Zeng's six Internet Cafes, where Net time retails for $3.60 an hour. Fast food for the information age. Zeng, whose Unicom-Sparkice Information Network operates under a license from the government, says his customers are hungry for every byte. "Don't you see?" asks Charles Zhang, another Beijing Netrepreneur. "This is freedom."

This is China? In a country known less for freedom than for a historic fear of information, Zeng and Zhang are signs that Beijing has settled on a firm and astonishing policy for the Net: jump in with both feet. Though China still blacks out dozens of sites (you won't read this story online in China: TIME's Pathfinder site is on the list), a rising generation of Western-educated officials is pressing home the argument that the Net is the perfect vehicle to transport the Middle Kingdom into the 21st Century. It's as if Deng Xiaoping's dictum, "To get rich is glorious," has collided with Moore's Law (of Intel founder Gordon Moore), "The speed of microprocessors will double every 18 months even as prices fall by half," to produce something you might call Jiang Zemin's Injunction: plug in, turn on, cash out. "The Chinese get the Net, O.K.?" says Sean Maloney, the Asia-Pacific boss for U.S. chip giant Intel. "China is going to be unrecognizable in five years. And a large part of that change is going to come through the Internet and onto computer screens." Maloney lets the idea sit for a beat as he ponders the idea of 1.2 billion computer-hungry Chinese. "Unrecognizable," he marvels.

Maloney is taking his cues from China's bureaucratic stratosphere, where top officials can't spend enough time chatting up Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Cisco and other members of the Net's royal family. "We can barely keep up with the demand for information," he says. Just last week the Chinese government approved a new series of laws designed to control how citizens connect to the Internet. But though the laws featured the usual restrictive rhetoric, they were clearly designed to get Chinese onto the Net in an orderly way, not keep them off altogether. The laws, and official curiosity about the power of the Internet, have Beijing buzzing these days. From dinner parties hosted by top officials at the Great Hall of the People to bull sessions among young technocrat planners over cold Snowflake Beer in the cafes of Sanlitun, the conversation has shifted from how to control the Net to how best to exploit it. "The government is betting that PCs and the Net can help competitiveness," says Thomas Lin, a Beijing-based product manager for Microsoft. "Now they want them on every desk."

And in every home. Every rich promise you've ever heard about the Net sounds especially beguiling in China. The country has 350 million children to educate--what better vehicle than interactive television? The Finance Ministry needs to establish bank and savings accounts for China's 284 million workers--what more effective solution than smart cards? Agricultural planners dream of more-productive Chinese farms--how better to send weather and agro-science information to 323 million farmers than over the Web?

To tap these benefits, China has embarked on a series of nine "golden projects" that will shotgun state-of-the-art technology into everything from health-care to finance. By 2010 hundreds of millions of Chinese will be wired to the Golden Bridge financial network, carrying Golden Card smart cards and automatically forking over a chunk of their salaries to the government via a microchip-enabled Golden Tax. Says Bryan Nelson, Microsoft's commanding general in the region: "China is going to be the ultimate proof of all that the Internet can do. And the amazing thing is the Chinese seem to understand that. Better than some people in the West, actually." At a recent dinner in Beijing, Jim Jarrett, Intel's president for China, sat next to an 80-ish woman whose 80-plus husband is a senior Chinese official. "She told me the first thing her husband does every morning is start up his computer and sign on to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times," he recalls. "That's his window on the world."

The window is still small--only 300,000 Chinese have access to the Internet, vs. some 25 million in the U.S.--but it is opening quickly. Officials at China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications say they hope to have 4 million Chinese connected by the year 2000. At the same time, access to the outside world from China--once tightly controlled over a narrow pipeline--has quadrupled this year, the result of newly liberalized government regulations. As late as 1996, most Net traffic to and from China had to flow through a single 56-kilobit circuit in Shanghai--some U.S. homes have more bandwidth than that. Now China has a pipeline a hundred times wider, and AT&T has just been hired to make it even bigger. Will China really have 4 million citizens online by 2000? "Try 20 million," says Zhang, who has watched the government exceed growth targets in everything from telephones to agricultural output.

Actually getting onto the Net is still difficult for the vast majority of Chinese. An Internet account requires a trip to the local phone office, which includes (after hours of waiting in line): your signature on an intimidating-sounding agreement not to violate dozens of Net rules (no pornography, no using the Net for anti-government activities, no downloading viruses), a registration with the police of your intent to surf and a hefty deposit--generally about $120, or more than a month's income for most Chinese. But the Net has such allure in improvement-obsessed China that usage continues to grow at more than 40% a year--doubling the country's Net population every two years. "It's a daily necessity," says Beijing Foreign Studies University student Zhang Tao. "I plan to get online soon. I feel like I miss a lot of things. I don't want to lag behind."

That fear of falling behind has led the government to quietly approve one of the most revolutionary features of China's new Net openness--a willingness to let select firms run unregulated leased-line networks from Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen directly to Hong Kong. From there, the entire Web beckons, uncensored and unmonitored. Walk the halls of high-tech companies in China, and you see Websites from around the world reflected in the eyeglasses of young Chinese engineers. As you watch these young surfers poke into any site that interests them, you can't help but think: these are the faces of Tiananmen--young, well-educated and now, more than eight years after the crackdown on Beijing's pro-democracy movement, enjoying essentially unlimited access to the outside world. "Nobody could have anticipated this," says Hong Lu, chief executive of UTStarcom, a wireless-communications firm that has been working in China since 1991. "The speed of change is so fast that all of your assumptions are wrong."

Among the wrong assumptions: that this gigabit-glasnost is just a passing phase. "This is a revolution," says Zeng, who plans to open 100 additional Internet Cafes throughout China by 2000. "I don't think there's any risk of turning back." Zeng's confidence comes from a sense (more than a sense actually--he serves on two government committees) that at the highest levels Chinese leaders are sold on the Net. The theory behind their enthusiasm is that technology and competitiveness are deeply linked. Much of this comes from China's ninth five-year plan, which was unveiled in 1996 and fired a kind of starter's pistol in the race for new technologies. After decades of autarchy, China began to look outside for the latest innovations. How to adapt technologies like computer networks and pagers to China's unique and delicate culture? The age-old mantra is still zhongxue weiti, xixue weiyong: Chinese thinking for our essence, Western learning for application. It's an idea with deep roots. "You don't have to look too far back in Chinese history to understand that this is a nation that has suffered because it didn't have the best technology," says Intel's Maloney. "The British were able to run wild here in the 1800s, not because they were better fighters but because their technology was 100 years ahead of China's. The Chinese don't want that to happen again."

But there's a catch: China still may try to build the electronic equivalent of the Great Wall around the country. Citizens would have easy access to domestic Websites but sites outside the mainland--cnn.com, for instance--might be blocked. China would become one big, self-contained Internet--what techies like to call an Intranet--sealed off from the rest of the world. Access to foreign sites would remain under government control. Says a Hong Kong engineer who has worked with China on high-level info policy for two decades: "The Chinese worry about the Net. Will it just be an inundation of Western content, or will it reflect Chinese culture? China has every right to find a balance between local and foreign content."

That's a balance the most nimble Chinese gymnast would find tough to maintain. The Net, after all, is fundamentally about openness. And if the idea of the Web is to make Chinese firms more competitive, that means letting them have access to everything from DuPont's chemicals Website to the U.S. Patent Office's listing of new inventions. For that reason, some Chinese think the government will drop all its talk about an Intranet and throw open the doors. Says a 24-year-old engineer at Sparkice: "Walk into any Chinese company with Net access and look at the hard drives, look at the bookmarks in the browsers. It's all U.S. content."

Even the most vigorous Net-proponents argue for a bit of patience. "Some control is needed at this point because otherwise China would go wild," says UTStarcom's Lu. "If you just jump too fast, it's not good." In an early attempt at a Net policy, the government in 1996 banned access to a range of sites, from playboy.com to time.com, in order to help combat "spiritual pollution." But an afternoon's surfing in Beijing shows the government fire walls that block access to these sites work only with limited success. While cnn.com is resolutely blocked, other Western news-focused sites are occasionally accessible because of software glitches on the black-out servers. And most Chinese with Net access are smart enough to find what they want even in the face of a watchful, nervous government. One group of university students in Tibet fired up a browser in front of a reporter recently and pointed the program at the most controversial site they could imagine: Bill Clinton's own www.whitehouse.gov. The opening screen, "Good evening from the White House," came up with no problem at all.

The job of policing the net falls to a rapidly growing team of full-time surfers inside the Public Security Bureau (PSB). Says an engineer who has seen the room in Beijing where the work goes on: "It's something of a joke. Here you have all these bureaucrats sitting around looking at dirty pictures all day. They know they can't control it. There are too many sites. They just want to stop the most high-profile sites for form's sake." Lin Quan, secretary-general of the State Science and Technology Commission, told a conference this year that official censorship would not be allowed to stop the growth of Net use. Instead, the government, like those in other countries, primarily wants to protect public morality.

The government has, however, been quick to stomp on any politically themed electronic bulletin boards. In the past few years the PSB has shut down several that were gaining a following. "No bulletin boards for us," one Chinese content developer swears. "That's looking for trouble." But you don't have to scrape very deep to find a political undercurrent to much of China's Net activity. A few curious E-mails sent from the U.S. to Chinese who had posted messages to international Net discussion forums yielded replies that were prompt and unfettered. "We use the E-mail to think what we want," one hacker from Nanjing wrote. "But watch out for these guys [in the government]. They're our KGB!"

The KGB, though, is losing to the MPT--the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications--which is pushing for a large Chinese Web presence. The MPT is encouraging local entrepreneurs to create Chinese-language versions of the same sort of electronic resources--from search engines to weather services--that are popular in the West. The number of Chinese Web pages has exploded from fewer than 100 in 1994 to more than a quarter million today, offering everything from book reviews to travel guides. Says Netrepreneur Zhang, an MIT-trained physicist who is dreaming of creating a Web-based media conglomerate: "Print publishing is very restricted in China, but the Net is considered a technological area. So we can do a lot of things without running into trouble." Already Zhang has licensed content from U.S. publishers and hired a local staff to create Chinese-language Web pages. His next step, inevitably: a stock market offering.

The MPT in Shanghai is funding a local-information network called the Infoport that will offer Chinese everything from maps of the city to electronic bill payment. Already the Shanghai Stock Exchange, working with Microsoft, has built a Website (www.stockstar.online.sh.cn) that offers real-time price quotes--something even the New York Stock Exchange hasn't yet managed. And Shanghai officials promise that the Infoport will become a Chinese Alexandria, the largest virtual library in the world. Zhang Linde, general manager of the project, is a patient, ambitious man: "Judge us in 2010," he says.

There are plenty of obstacles to overcome between now and 2010. But the two biggest--thin ownership of both personal computers and telephones--are fading. Last year, Chinese purchased 2.1 million PCs, up from 190,000 in 1992. When figures for 1997 are in, PC sales should top Japan's, and by 2000 China will be a bigger market than the U.S. Telephones are also proliferating, from 70 million in 1995 to 100 million today. To install the first million phone lines in Shanghai took from 1893 to 1992; the second million required two years, and the next two million only 18 months. And China is busy installing a sophisticated fiber network that rivals anything in the West. The government has invested $28 billion on more than 100,000 km of optical fiber that now links 85% of the country. And in a land where guanxi (connections) are vital, marrying the PC and the telephone is an idea with resonance. "It's not just know-how here in China, it's know-who," says Mark Mechem, a U.S. trade official in Beijing. "E-mail is the ultimate guanxi tool."

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to the growth of computers and the Net in China is the tyranny of English in the digital world. Western-style keyboards aren't set up to type Chinese characters. The best system for doing so, the stroke-based input method editor, was devised in the 1960s and involves using complex three- and four-key combinations to enter specific characters. Where Westerners can be taught to use a standard keyboard in hours, learning to type in Chinese can take months. Worse, the Web, which is still largely rendered in English, is impenetrable to the vast majority of Chinese.

Technology is solving many of these problems. Already, ingenious local programmers have hacked together a program that translates English-language Web pages word by word. Users simply point their mouse at a word they don't understand, and a translation appears on the screen. The future holds greater promise: Intel and Microsoft are each spending millions of dollars to develop Chinese-language voice-recognition systems that will obviate the need for a keyboard. Possibly as soon as 2005, Chinese will be able to talk to their computers and see their words on the screen. Intel's Maloney, for instance, suspects voice recognition will open up the PC market to more than 100 million new Chinese customers.

It's a dazzling proposition that has lured the best and brightest U.S. tech executives to China, confident that it will be the next infotech bonanza. Microsoft's Nelson, who has quietly watched his sales double and then double again, is expanding his staff and investing huge amounts of time selling the Microsoft message everywhere from Shenzhen to Nanjing. "There's no real mystery here," he says over dinner at a restaurant in Hong Kong, where he is based. "We've been into hundreds of markets where there's no information-technology business. And we know how to build those businesses. This just happens to be the largest market in the world."

Insiders say Nelson, whose Hong Kong office is sprinkled with totems of quiet power (photos with Bill Gates and Deng, for instance), is among the most powerful Westerners in China, a man who can get any call returned. Among his latest coups: a deal with the Communist Party newspaper People's Daily to build a state-of-the-art Website using Microsoft technology. Though Microsoft still faces tremendous piracy and counterfeiting problems--some estimates suggest that only 5% of Microsoft's programs are used legitimately--Nelson thinks the problem, with patience, is fixable. "It's simply a matter of education." Already Microsoft has launched an advertising campaign to explain that while information may want to be free, the software that delivers it isn't.

Many Chinese already understand that. In their eyes, the Net is as much a tool for the rapid creation of wealth as anything else. Zeng's Sparkice, for instance, recently won a contract to put details on 750,000 private, state-run and joint-venture businesses into a Web database. When the project is complete in two years, firms from around the world will be able to use the Net to interact with Chinese companies. A Singapore concern looking to sell bamboo roofs will be able to bid on a Shanghai construction project via a Web browser. Sparkice will take a piece of every deal. "It's win-win," says Zeng. "The government wants to promote these companies. The companies want to advertise, and we want the business." Zhu Wei, 44, who runs the research institute of the Science and Technology Commission and serves as president of Wanfang Data Corp., a state-funded info-services business, says a new appreciation of technology is quickly taking root. "There's a popular saying in China now: modernization means knowing how to master a foreign language, drive a car and use a computer," he says. "If you want to survive in the information age, you have to know how to use a computer."

Still, it's not clear that China will ever have the sort of open information society that has become commonplace in the West. So far, access to the world of the Net is still limited to China's elites. It's not hard to imagine a two-tier information society, along the lines of something in Plato's Republic, with a small group of info-haves dominating a much larger group of have-nots. Arrayed against this vision of limited freedom, however, is the Net's record of openness everywhere else it has landed--and even a sense among some Chinese that the Net may be the country's last, best hope of modernizing. "Much has to change here," says Michael Tung, a Beijing-based telecom engineer. "Technology is the only way."

The ultimate question is whether Jiang Zemin's government will continue to allow such information gifts to float into China. Amid the pressures of Communist Party politics and the demands of managing a nation of 1.2 billion people, will he be able to tolerate the triple threat of an Internet society: openness, transparency and democracy? Smarter, better-informed businessmen may be more competitive in the new global economy but they are also, inevitably, better informed about life in the outside world--and the rights and freedoms that China doesn't yet permit.

Jiang, however, may be China's Surfer-in-Chief. In a recent interview with TIME, he confided that he has a PC at his Zhongnanhai home and uses it to log onto foreign data bases. And top officials insist he is committed to a wired China, fully aware that the country's future depends on growth, which relies, in turn, on technology. Is it just possible that the real great leap forward begins with the initials www?

--With Reporting by Jaime A. Florcruz /Beijing

From Time Magazine

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