Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but in a very few years,

Riley and Campbell and Cheung, the 700 sysops of the Hong Kong boards, and all of their subscribers are going to go to bed free men and women and wake up subjects of an unimaginably corrupt totalitarian dictatorship whose concept of a legal system is to blow the offender's head off with a revolver and then send the victim's mother a bill for the bullet (27 fen, or about a nickel). Is China going to eat Hong Kong alive, or is Hong Kong going to impregnate its new host with more new memes than it can deal with?

Let's start with the first possibility.

Cheung's got a copy of some 10 Mbytes of traffic from soc.culture.china that appeared between the first hunger strikes in Tiananmen in mid-May and the end of June. Ninety percent of it is from from overseas Chinese in universities and tech companies in the States, who typically act as intermediaries between the Net and their friends in the PRC.

It would be nice to report that the Net played some crucial role in the democratic demonstrations leading up to June 4th, but in Cheung's opinion it didn't create any impact of any kind - fax played a greater role. Still, fax is part of the Greater Network.

Cheung wants to extend the Net into China, and a lot of Chinese badly want him to do it -not because they want to read the latest on alt.sex.bondage but because they want to network their offices together, in China and other parts of Asia, without having to lease lines.

But the telcos are part of the government, and there's the rub.

The tech he's peddling is just as powerful as the telcos' packet data networks, so an outfit like his, once it gets its hands on leased lines connecting various countries, represents a competitive threat to Mao Bell, and to the numerous other immense Chinese ministries who are setting up networks of their own and trying to compete with Mao Bell. So, given the way business is done in the area, it's not likely that the governments will let him in (to China or any other Southeast Asian country besides Hong Kong) anytime soon.