China Internet Museum

Current position: Character>>Mao Wei

Mao Wei

In 1994, Mao Wei, as a key technician, joined the project of China’s full functional connection to the Internet, which is considered to be the beginning of China's entry into the age of the Internet. Mao Wei thus won the grand prize of the Science and Technology Progress Award of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the prize of National Science and Technology Progress Award. In 1997, Mao Wei founded the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) and became the first director of CNNIC. During his tenure, he held the vision of building a world-class network information center, actively promoted the national domain name of “.CN” to b e a major domain name, and laid the foundation for establish a secure, independent and controllable Internet. Under his leadership, CNNIC launched the first Chinese domain name system in the world, and promoted the “.中国” domain name to be used globally. It signaled that Chinese culture mounted on the Internet arena, and broke the International rules that domain name could only use English characters. Later the International Domain Names system began to expand rapidly in the world, triggering a great revolution since the birth of Internet 40 years ago. Mao Wei is also the author of two Internet Standards. He organized CNNIC to apply for a large number of IPv4 addresses, which was 22.5% of the total IPv4 address volume of China. The rank of second-class in volume globally has promoted the rapid growth of China’s Internet. Since 1997, Mao Wei, together with CNNIC, released series of Statistical Report on Internet Development in China, which describes situation of the development of China's Internet fundamentals. Multiple data have been regarded as significant China's Internet macroscopic index, which play imperative roles in the governmental decision-making progress.