Upon returning from a trip to the mountains on Wednesday
afternoon, Li Hui logged on to QQ, the country's most popular chat
program. A routine run-through of his online contacts made the
Party chief anxious - Liu Jianrong, Sandu village's first and only
web administrator, was offline.
Li rushed to the villagers' free Net caf, only to find it had
been struck by a brief power outage. Liu was there, along with a
group of peasants patiently waiting to get online.
Even in this third-smallest village in Wuyishan, a county-level
city in the eastern part of Fujian, an Internet culture is taking
shape, in large part due to Digital Wuyi, a local project aimed at
creating an information-based society.
Initiated by the Wuyishan government with an investment of 12
million yuan ($1.5 million) and another 3 million yuan from joint
sponsors SZWY, Smartdot, Intel and Microsoft, the project's first
phase kicked off in April in 22 of Wuyishan's 115 administrative
villages.
Sandu, a village of 514 people who live on oranges and
tangerines from the nearby mountains, and corn and taro from their
fields, is one of them.
The program's launch coincided and merged with the Peasant
Online Library Project set up by Wuyishan's culture and sports
bureau. The bureau donated several Lenovo Celeron D computers to
villages in the area, while Digital Wuyi commissioned another five
to 10 Dell Celeron Ds, a 29-inch TCL television set and a touch
kiosk built by Beijing Riyao to each of the 22 villages.
Sandu's Net caf is open from 9-11:30 am and 2-5:30 pm every day
except Sunday and is free for villagers aged 10 and older. Net cafs
in some other villages are open only in the afternoon during the
farming season.
The centers were not built just so people could surf the Net.
Rather, villagers are encouraged to - and often do - use the
facilities to communicate with their fellow peasants across the
country about farming techniques, video chat with family working
elsewhere, read books, watch films and listen to music from the
online archives of the national and provincial libraries, through
2,000 free accounts.
Interested villagers can take part in free computer training
classes twice a year, or ask for guidance from their local
supervisors, Li said.
The county's 22 administrators, which include Liu in Sandu and
Jiang Yuehong in nearby Xingtian village, were trained for a month
in March. The administrators are required to report when they start
and finish work to both the Digital Wuyi management system and
their QQ group. In addition, a video camera is installed atop every
administrator's computer, allowing the authorities to keep track of
their work.
The administrators, most of them middle-aged women who are
computer rookies, face a big new task: They were recently asked to
establish websites for their villages on Taobao, China's answer to
eBay, to promote local farm products.
But, as Jiang put it: "It's a new job in a new area, where life
can grow a little tedious at times. People enjoy coming to the
center, and I like this job. It's less demanding than farm work
once you get the hang of it."
(China Daily November 13, 2007)