According to the January 2000 CNNIC Survey Report, China had, at the end of 1999, 48,695 registered domain names with the ".cn" country code. This is not the whole story, however, as the Chinese registered more top-level domain names (.com, .net, and .org) than they did sites with their own country code domain name. In May 1999, Network Solutions Inc. reported that China surpassed Australia to become the No.1 country in the Asia-Pacific region and No.8 in the world in the number of top-level domain name registrations. Four months later, in September 1999, Network Solutions Inc. reported China rose to No. 5 in the world with more than 70,000 top-level domain names registered.

More than 70 percent of the most popular China Web sites listed in the January 2000 report use a top-level domain name. Among the main reasons Chinese prefer top-level domain names to their own country-code domain name could be that:

1. The China country code domain name registration has been available for businesses only. Individuals are not allowed to register a ".cn" Web site.

2. The interconnection bandwidth between China's five backbone networks--namely ChinaNet, ChinaInfo, CERNet, CSTNet, and GBNet--have been even narrower than China's international exit bandwidths. As of 1999, the total international exit bandwidth was 351 Mbps, rising from 241 Mbps six months before.

Dizzying Domains

Another unique feature of domain name registration in China is that a great many domain names use numbers instead of letters, such as 163.com and 263.net. So far, Chinese characters have not been allowed to be used in domain names, so Hanyu Pinyin--a Romanized, written translation of how Chinese sounds--has to be employed instead. The problem with using Pinyin is that it doesn't amount to a one-for-one translation of the Chinese characters at all--one word in Pinyin can represent tens or even hundreds of written Chinese characters that sound the same or similar. Besides, a great number of Chinese people who speak a dizzying number of dialects are not familiar with Hanyu Pinyin, not to mention the Roman alphabet, which is also still so alien to the Chinese masses.

A Chinese Web pioneer invented a way of using Internet access phone numbers in domain names. Many followed suit. Now, numbers in domain names can be any figures or codes Chinese find easy to remember. For example, China's pioneering e-commerce Web site, 8848.net, uses the metric height of the Mt. Everest in its domain name.

At the end of 1999, there were 15,153 established Web sites with ".cn" in their domain names. Only 31 percent of registered domain names corresponded to live Web sites, reflecting that a majority of the registered domain names were kept offline for resale or were registered in advance for protection of brand names and trademarks only.

VI. THE MOST POPULAR WEB SITES IN CHINA