Chinese Vice President Hu Jintao headed a group of Party and government officials this evening on a visit to the 3rd International Exhibition on Technologies and Services of the Data Communication Network.

Hu, also a standing committee member of the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, visited the booths of government departments as well as Chinese and foreign information network enterprises with great interest, asking for details about the information-based development of the national economy, and government, corporate and family on-line progress, as well as e-commerce development.

He expressed satisfaction with the rapid development of China's public data communications network in a short period of time. Information available at the exhibition shows that by the end of last year, China had 3.5 million on-line host machines, over 15, 000 web homepages, more than 48,000 registered domain titles, over 8.9 million web users, and 520 Internet service providers. Sponsored by the Data Communication Bureau of China Telecom and the China Science and Technology Consulting Center, the exhibition is displaying network transmission and exchange, services, network safety, plug-in technologies, and other state-of-the-art data communications products.