The Chinese library's digital environment

Abstract:

In China, people view the Internet's popularity as the dawn of the digital era. Therefore, the rapid Internet development in China is reviewed in this chapter. However, different regions still have obvious development gaps. The information content industry is also introduced, which lags behind the information technology industry. Finally, digital publishing is discussed. Along with the continuous enhancement of digital publishing technology and Internet application, national reading habits and reading environments are changing day by day. China's digital publishing industry has entered the phase of high-speed development. For Chinese libraries, such a digital environment provides both opportunities and challenges.

Key words

China

library

digital environment

Internet

information industry

digital publishing

The "digital era" mentioned in this book's title is a widely used term. But what exactly is the starting point of this era? We need to isolate the timeline of the digital era in order to narrate its contents in a unified context.

At the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates made the opening address for the eleventh time. It was not only his eleventh opening address, but also his farewell speech. In his last CES opening keynote address, Gates referred back to the sweeping changes since 2001 that have formulated the first true "digital decade", which included the expanding popularity of Windows-based PCs, the growing prevalence of broadband networks, the increasing usage of cell phones, and the advent of portable digital media devices (Microsoft, 2008). It seems the information industry mogul considered 2001 to be the first year of the digital era, because of the emphasis on a mobile Internet.

Nevertheless, prior to 2001, the term "digital era" had still been widely in use. In China, people view the Internet's popularity as indicating the dawn of the digital era.

Review of internet development in China

On 20 April 1994, the National Computing and Networking Facility of China (NCFC) project opened up a special 64 K international line on the Internet through Sprint Co. Ltd of the United States. Since then, China has been officially recognized as a country with fully functional Internet accessibility (Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, 2010).

In China, 1997 was a year mixed with tragedies and excitements. There were two important, memorable events for most Chinese people in this year: on 19 February 1997, the chief architect of China's Reform and Openness, Deng Xiaoping, passed away; and on 1 July 1997, Hong Kong's sovereignty was returned to China. But, for China, 1997 had much more in store than those two singular events. An international financial storm and a domestic industrial product "structural surplus" made it a year of a collapse for Chinese enterprises' history. A group of famous companies tumbled and collapsed because they had not been sufficiently aware of the risks caused by over-development. At the same time, the company Lenovo had a totally different atmosphere of success experience: it had sold out 430,000 sets of PCs in 12 months, surpassing IBM and rising to become the number one in the Chinese market. Yet, just as the journalist and writer Ling (2007) observed, computer manufacturers' brilliance was just the achievement of the struggle over the past years, while the appearance of Internet companies was the dawn of a new era. It was in this year that things started to change. Reforms were pushed forward and a lot of Internet enterprises arose, bringing China into the "first year" of the Internet era.

Looking back on that period, the success of Internet industry meant much more than the rise of a pillar industry for China. The development of the Internet was considered a great opportunity for China to promote reform, opening up, and modernization.

In 1978, China began to carry out this reform and opening up. In a country with a population of 1.3 billion people, China's rigidly planned economic system gradually broke down and transformed into a business society. The 30 years following 1978 was a period when China's economic development was growing at its fastest.

Early in 2008, China became the country with the most netizens (Internet users) in the world. On 16 January 2012, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC, 2012) released its 29 th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China. According to this report, at the end of December 2011, the number of net citizens in China had reached 513 million. The popularity rate of the Internet had climbed up to 38.3 percent, higher than the world average (30.2 percent). Chinese netizens accounted for 22.63 percent of global users, 50.5 percent of the Asian netizens (Internet World Stats, 2011). In 2011, the percentage of Internet users with a middle- or low-level education was consistently increasing. Until the end of 2011, netizens who had received an education equal to or below a junior high school-level degree comprised 44.2 percent of the total. The number of mobile netizens has reached 356 million, accounting for 69.3 percent of all netizens. Out of these netizens, 73.4 percent use desktop computers online while those using mobiles and laptops account for 69.3 percent and 46.8 percent, respectively (CNNIC, 2012).

From the urban-rural structural view, along with continuously enhanced Internet access conditions in rural areas, the hardware equipment required for the Internet in the countryside has become increasingly developed and the netizens there have been continuously growing as well. At the end of 2011, the rural netizens in China reached 136 million people, accounting for 26.5 percent of the Chinese population. Due to accelerated modernization, citizens in rural areas have been migrating to cities on a large scale, making the rural netizen growth less obvious. In 2011, the average time netizens spent surfing the Internet was 18.7 hours per week. The urban and rural distribution of mobile internet users is generally the same as for all internet users. Mobile internet users in rural areas account for 27.3 percent (CNNIC, 2012).

According to the statistics in the White Paper of China's Internet Status released by the State Council Information Office in China in June 2010, the infrastructure development ensured Internet access for 99.3 percent of towns and 91.5 percent of villages, and broadband for 96 percent of the towns (Information Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, 2010).

But from the Internet popularity rate mentioned above, it is clear that different regions still have development gaps. Compared with the global Internet penetration rate (30.2 percent) in 2011, there are 21 provinces that exceed such a level. Among 21 provinces, Internet penetration in 12 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) exceeds the national average level. Most of those provinces are concentrated in the east coast. The Internet penetration rate in nine provinces is higher than the global average, but lower than Chinese overall Internet penetration. There are ten provinces with Internet penetration lower than the global average, most of which are less developed central and western region provinces (CNNIC, 2012).

In China, non-netizens' major reason for not using the Internet is lack of knowledge about how to use a computer or the Internet; this factor's influence is becoming greater. At the end of 2009, 32.6 percent of non-netizens did not use the Internet due to the lack of computer/Internet skills; this figure rose to 47.9 percent in a survey in June 2011. Most of them are and/or rural-based (CNNIC, 2011a).

In the USA, an information revolution started during the 1960s. People born in the 1950s to the 1990s are considered to be part of the "digital generation." There are no major "digital gaps" between them. This is why Mark Zuckerberg (the founder of Facebook) who was born in the 1980s could compete with Steve Jobs (the founder of Apple Inc.) who was born in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the social structure of the USA is an "olive", with a large amount of middle class, and no significant regional gap, and urban-rural gap; therefore, the American Internet is an undifferentiated network. That is not the case in China. China's Internet not only connects to the latest high-end laptop but also connects to a cheap knockoff cell phone. China's elite may be synchronized with the high-tech USA trends, while the poorer of China can only be synchronized with Vietnam's Internet trends. Because of this, it was said that the real "digital generation" in China could only exist in a big city among tens of millions of middle-class citizens. All the rest of the hundreds of millions of China's Internet users, in the final analysis, could only be consumers of Instant Messenger, indulging in cheap virtual entertainment (Shen, 2010). The cell phone is the main tool for rural users of the Internet who cannot enjoy a mass of digital information resources. A survey by iResearch indicated that netizens in...