This is an attempt to find out "good" five web sites for people seeking information to do business in China. Before doing the evaluation, I have to set out with a simple list of criteria .

    The result is the following five web sites :
 

1. China Today
2. China Economic Information Network
3. Shanghai Economic Information Network
4. China Market
5. China Law

General impressions on visiting Chinese sites :
 

• Too many of them are very common.
• A lot of trading sites.
• Very hard to find good sites !!! A lot of them are me-too's and they have a lot of bad links.
• It's VERY SLOW to access .cn sites. The bottleneck seems to be on the Chinese site as my poor 28.8K modem is not fully utilized when accessing any .cn site. Too many sites not worth to try with slow links make the process itself miserably long.
• Some of the sites seem to have very good content but they ask for a subscription. However, you can't subscribe online. You leave a telephone number and they will call you back. One site even not provide the subscription options on the site. How many subscribers do they expect to serve ?

Out-dated information is another big problem. Some of the sites provide non-timestamped news and some old dates may imply that the sites have been abandoned !