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Mark O'Neill

Beijing has ordered the chiefs of the mainland's airlines to be in the air on January 1 to win public confidence and show their faith in defeating the millennium bug.

 This is the most dramatic example of the efforts being made by the authorities to combat the bug.

 The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has set up a dedicated working group to deal with the problem.

 'The threat of the bug is less than in developed countries because China is less reliant on computers,' said Zhao Bo, director of the MII's division of computers and systems engineers.

 'But for banks and other financial companies, it is a problem just as in other countries.'  Some leading state banks had already spent 700 million yuan (about HK$651.49 million) to 800 million yuan on dealing with the Y2K bug and would have spent one billion by the end of the year, he said.

 For large state companies, the bill would be several hundreds of millions of yuan, Mr Zhao said.

 Meanwhile, Xinhua news agency reported that MII had set up three training centres to help state-run companies and institutions find ways to prevent the millennium bug.

 The three centres, in Beijing, Shanghai and Sichuan, would stage lectures and provide demonstrations on dealing with the bug, Xinhua said.

 Beijing has set a deadline of mid-year to fix the bug.

 Older computer systems that read years by the last two digits will be unable to record the correct date next year and may malfunction.

 The government has tried to force industries into fixing their computer systems, but a lack of technical know-how, reliance on a mishmash of software and dubious financial support for the programme have raised concerns whether the mainland will be anywhere near ready.

 Mr Zhao said banks and all other companies should draft an emergency plan before January 1 in case everything goes wrong.

 'Of course, one method is to make a back-up of all their disks on December 30 or 31. The banks need to guarantee a smooth flow of funds in case links between them are broken,' he said.

 'We are trying to ensure that there will not be economic losses to the state and no social damage.

 'Different systems must be able to recognise each other. If you change one software, you have to make sure it will work properly with other applications in the same network.'  The big risk for the mainland comes from pirated software which is widely used and may account for more than half the total.

 If airlines, the railways, the banks or other leading public companies use pirated software that has not been corrected, it could lead to chaos on their networks.

 Mr Zhao said that it was more difficult to deal with the Y2K bug in pirated software because the user cannot go back to the original supplier to correct it.

 'Y2K is everywhere, in software, hard disk, bios, data bases, supporting and application programmes and office and printing programmes,' he said.

 The MII's working group has trained more than 5,000 computer engineers to deal with the bug in their own companies and will have trained thousands more by the end of the year.

 MII expects sales of computers this year to reach five million units, up from four million last year and 3.5 million units in 1997.



Mainland orders air chiefs aloft in acid test of Y2K readiness