China's Wen makes Internet debut

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China's Wen makes Internet debut
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BEIJING (AFP) — Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao joined the Internet craze Saturday as he chatted online with netizens for the first time, broaching issues as diverse as a shoe-throwing protest and corruption among officials.

The online discussion attracted thousands of questions from people in China and abroad, with some querying the amount he earned, how long he slept a day, and how much alcohol he could drink, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

But Wen chose not to answer those, focusing instead on the more serious issues of the economic crisis, China's healthcare reform and the shoe-throwing incident that took place in Cambridge, Britain, this month.

A 27-year-old German student hurled a shoe at Wen when he was making a speech at Cambridge University as part of an official visit to Britain, shouting "this is a scandal" and calling him a dictator.

"I acted very calmly. What I thought first was the national dignity, people's dignity and to maintain the friendship between China and Britain," he wrote on the official central government website www.gov.cn.

"I needed to continue this lecture without disturbance. It's my personal style."

On the subject of corruption, Wen said the government was preparing for officials to declare their assets in an effort to fight widespread graft in China.

He warned that the global economic crisis had not yet hit bottom, and wrote in depth about the Chinese government's efforts to steer the country through the downturn.

Wen's online chat to the people of China was his first, and comes after President Hu Jintao fielded questions on the Internet in June last year.

Wen has tried to forge a reputation as a man of the people, contrasting with his publicly much more staid and stern colleagues in the ruling Communist Party hierarchy.

China's online population, already the world's largest, had risen to 298 million by the end of 2008, nearly equal to the population of the United States, according to a recent Chinese industry survey.

However China's Internet is also regarded as one of the most heavily censored, with the communist authorities seeking to block a wide range of issues they believe may threaten their rule.

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