January
DDN line of CERNET national backbone network started to be upgraded to 512K.
January 1
People.cn run by People's Daily was connected to the Internet. It was China's first central major news publicity website.
From April 18 to 21
National Informatization Working Conference was held in Shenzhen. The meeting identified definition, elements, guideline, principles, objectives and main tasks of the national informatization system and passed the 9th "Five-year" Plan on Informatization and 2000 Prospective Targets. It included China's Internet into national information infrastructure building and proposed to set up China Internet Information Center and Network Access Point.
May 6
Then Vice Premier Zhu Rongji of the State Council visited CERNET Network Center in the company of Zhu Kaixuan, Director of State Education Commission, Wang Dazhong, President of Tsinghua University, and Liang Youneng, Director of CERNET Administration Committee and Executive Vice President of Tsinghua University.
May 20
The State Council promulgated the Decision on the Revision of the Interim Provisions on Administration of the International Networking of Computer Information Networks in the People's Republic of China to revise the Interim Provisions on Administration of the International Networking of Computer Information Networks.
May 30
Office of the State Council Informatization Leading Group issued the Interim Administration Methods for Domain Name Registration of China's Internet Networks, authorizing Chinese Academy of Sciences to set up and administer China Internet Network Information Center and authorizing CERNET Network Center to sign agreements with CNNIC and manage the second-level domain name .edu.cn.
May 31
Beijing University of Chemical Technology cut off its satellite special line and established connection to CERNET.
June
National 9th "Five-year" key scientific and technological project "Research on Key Technologies for Computer Information Network and Its Application" passed expert review organized by State Education Commission.
June
State Council Informatization Office officially authorized CERNET to administer the domain name .edu.cn.
June 3
State Council Informatization Office promulgated the Rules for Implementation of China's Internet Network Domain Name Registration and the Interim Administration Method for China's Internet Network Domain Name Registration.
June 3
As consigned by the Office of State Council Informatization Leading Group, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) officially set up China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) at Computer Network Information Center, CAS to exercise responsibilities of national Internet network information center. On the same day, the Office of State Council Informatization Leading Group announced to set up CNNIC Steering Committee, which would be headed by CAS Vice President Hu Qiheng.
July
State Council Informatization Leading Group issued the National 9th "Five-year" Plan on Informatization and 2010 Prospective Objective Outline.
September
With the support of related institutions, CERNET launched the 512K satellite channels from Beijing to Xi'an, from Beijing to Chengdu and from Beijing to Shenyang.
October
The 4th CERNET Academic Annual Meeting was held in Xi'an and 350 delegates from over 200 units connected to the network in China attended the meeting.
October
CHINANET realized interconnection with another three Internet networks of China, namely CSTNET, CERNET and CHINAGBN.
November
China Internet Network Information Center issued the first Statistical Report on Internet Development in China. Up to October 31, 1997, there were 299,000 computers connected to Internet, 620,000 Internet users, 4,066 domain names registered under .CN, 1,500 WWW websites and 25.408M international export bandwidth in China.
December 8
State Council Informatization Leading Group passed the Implementation Method of the Interim Provisions on the Administration of International Networking of Computer Information Networks in the People's Republic of China.
December 30
Ministry of Public Security issued the Administration Method for Security Protection of International Networking of Computer Information Networks that was approved by the State Council.
1997
China officially set up 3G Evaluation and Research Group and submitted China's TDSCDMA standard.
January
Jack Ma and his team developed a series of national-level websites such as official website of Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, online China Commodity Exchange Market, online China Technology Export Fair, zhaoshang.net, online Canton Fair and China International Business in Beijing.
January
33-year-old PhD. Zhang Chaoyang from Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded Aitexin website. In February next year, he launched the website sohu .
February
National network of Info Highway was launched. It was launched in eight cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Shenzhen, Xi'an, Shenyang and Harbin within three months, becoming China's earliest and also largest private ISP and ICP.
March
IBM put the first business network animation flag in China at ChinaByte . ChinaByte earned its first advertising income.
April
ChinaByte had its website visit flow audited by a third party, a specialized public relations company affiliated to internationally authoritative media monitoring agency ACNielsen, taking the first step for gearing itself to international conventions.
June
26-year-old Ding Lei founded NetEase in Guangzhou with a primary registered capital of RMB500,000. NetEase officially launched all-Chinese search engine service.
September
Kingsoft released WPS97 golden package, which became the first made-in-China character processing software running on Windows.
October
Stone Richsight secured USD6.5 million venture capital from three venture companies including Walden International, Bank of America and Ivanhoe International. This was the first venture capital granted to China's IT industry.
On October 22 and 23
Assets of Guangdong Mobile Communications and Zhejiang Mobile Communications were injected to China Telecom (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd (later renamed China Mobile (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd) respectively and the two companies were listed in New York and Hong Kong respectively.
November
KV300+ was launched into market, becoming China's first anti-virus software that could radically remove "macro virus". Later, other software of the kind also initiated the function of eliminating "macro virus" and the virus was gradually eliminated.
November
Sun Deliang, who graduated from computer major of Shenyang University of Technology, launched China's first specialized vertical chemical website China Chemical Network (English edition), which was the earliest edition of ChemNet. In December 1997, ChemNet became China's first vertical B2B e-commerce business website.
November
NetEase independently developed the first all-Chinese free e-mail system in China.
January
The magazine Internet & Intranet was born. It was the first Internet magazine in China and was sponsored by China Center for Computer and Microelectronics Development under former Ministry of Electronics Industry.
February 28
State Council Informatization Office held the Seminar on Digital Information Revolution. Nicholas Negroponte paid a visit to China for the first time and delivered the keynote speech on Digital Information Revolution.
October
MOP was set up.
November 2
China's first forum post "Dalian Jinzhou Has No Tear" was published at the sports salon of Stone Richsight. This was also the first blog article and was considered China's first football blog. Only 48 hours after the article was posted, the number of visits exceeded 20,000, hitting the record high back then.
1997
China's first book that comprehensively introduced birth, development, current status and future trend of Internet Network Is the King was published. The author was Hu Yong, one of the pioneers who studied on Internet and new media in China.
