"We can cross the wall and reach all corners of the world;" are the words Werner Zorn typed into a computer at Beijing University on Sep. 20 1987 Seconds later the words appeared on the big computer at the University of Karlsruhe in southern Germany. That was the first email from China. Zorn had gone to China to connect scientists to the new network.

"That was the time when China was beginning to open up," Zorn recalls. "When Deng Xiaoping had said things should be better. And in this political climate, anything which might improve things was seen to be good."

But not everybody wanted China to have more links to the world. Military officials and politicians in the US were worried about China getting its hands on modern technology.

So, Zorn remembers, German computers and know-how were used. He says that the Siemens computers were as big as wardrobes.

The emails started flowing to-and-fro between the continents and Chinese IT experts could finally take part in the international debate. Moreover, there was not much control of the network at the time.

Keeping Internet under control

By 1994, China had developed its own independent network. But two years later, it put an end to free development by publishing regulations on how to control the Internet.

Hu Qiheng, the president of the Internet Society of China, which works closely with the Ministry of Information Industry, says that the Internet has still managed to develop widely.

"The Internet today is used not only by the majority of young people but also by very many older people in China. And the Chinese Internet economy is growing faster than the rest of teh Chinese economy." But he says there has to be control of the Internet because there is crime, fraud and "many bad things" in Chinese society which need to be monitored online as well.

But opposition figures are angry that it is usually their government-critical websites which are affected by state censorship and say that it goes against the innovative spirit of the Internet.

Werner Zorn reminds people that innovation has always been a tool against political control and recommends people stay in touch with closed countries -- by sending emails for instance.