China closed banks (old news?)greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread |
http://www.insidechina.com/news.php3?id=121865China To Suspend Banking On December 31
BEIJING, Dec 30, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Despite official optimism about the millennium computer bug China announced Wednesday all banking, credit cooperatives and post offices would suspend banking and savings operations on December 31.
The People's Bank of China (PBOC) said the move would allow sufficient time for the banking businesses to do their final accounting and for the smooth transition of their computer systems to the year 2000, Xinhua reported.
On January 1 and January 2 "business at various banking outlets will be conducted according to their holiday schedules," the official news agency said without elaborating.
A PBOC official was quoted as saying the Chinese banking industry wa well prepared for the transition to 2000.
Since 1996 the industry had focused considerable human resources and money into upgrading, rewriting and testing its computer systems and had conducted three nationwide tests in June, July and September this year, it said, without saying what the result of the tests had been.
In the meantime it formed emergency plans and rehearsed for emergency situations, the official said.
The industry's major banking systems "are ready to combat the millennium bug and clients can be sure of the security of their money at the banks," the official stressed.
The millennium or Y2K computer bug means older computers and programmes which use only two digits to read the year may fail to change over to 2000 and instead accept the year as 1900 causing shutdowns and faults.
The Chinese population has been kept largely in the dark over the Y2K problem with warnings issued only to those sectors most affected.
"We don't want to alarm the population unnecessarily and ruin their plans for the holiday," the head of China's national bureau on Y2K, Zhang Qi, explained recently. ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)
-- Hokie (Hokie_@hotmail.com), December 31, 1999
China Braces for MillenniumChina Braces for Millennium
By ELAINE KURTENBACH Associated Press Writer
BEIJING (AP) An air of celebration tinged with apprehension reigned Friday in Beijing as China braced for the turn of the millennium.
Beijingers hoping to have a little extra cash on hand were disappointed when they discovered ATM machines closed for the day as a precaution against computer troubles related to the transition to 2000. Signs posted near the machines said they would be turned back on Saturday. Banks also were closed.
``Though we're confident of solving the computer millennium bug problem, we are preparing for the worst,'' the state-run Xinhua News Agency quoted Zhang Qi, director of the government's emergency Y2K headquarters, as saying.
For many Chinese, the turn of the millennium was simply an extra day off, and a good opportunity to celebrate.
Festivities got underway Friday with a mass wedding of 2,000 couples at a stadium in northern Beijing.
To ward off the cold, under their fluffy white gowns many of the brides were seen wearing long underwear.
With snow and subfreezing temperatures forecast, midnight celebrations were to be kept to under an hour at Beijing's newest monument, the Century Altar, site of a glitzy New Year's Eve gala.
There, Chinese leaders and 25,000 carefully chosen citizens were to mark the millennium with fireworks, dancing and the lighting of a new ``eternal flame.''
On the ancient Great Wall, entertainers were to perform imperial-style rituals.
Police imposed tight security near the Century Altar and kept a heavy guard around Tiananmen Square, where members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement have been staging peaceful protests against the government's suppression of their group and long prison sentences imposed on key members.
Worried that such movements could signal a revival of the country's long tradition of doomsday cults, government leaders railed against Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi for, they claim, saying only he could prevent ``the end of the world.''
Anxious to avoid apocalyptic overtones, the leaders of the world's last communist giant are wrapping the celebration of the new millennium, like most other landmark occasions, in patriotic appeals.
On Friday, China's envoy to Taiwan, Wang Daohan, sent a New Year's greeting reiterating his willingness to visit the island, but only if it drops its insistence on being treated as a sovereign state, the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
Beijing considers Taiwan, ruled separately since 1949, a renegade province and has declared its recovery a sacred national goal.
Wang was expected to visit Taiwan this fall, reciprocating a historic visit by Taiwan envoy Koo Chen-fu to Shanghai and Beijing last year. Wang's trip was postponed indefinitely after Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui angered Beijing in July by demanding the two sides treat each other as equals at the bargaining table.
The latest tension between the rival governments prompted a flurry of attacks on Chinese computers by Taiwanese hackers. Chinese authorities ordered all agencies and state industries to be on guard against sabotage, viruses and other assaults on its computer systems. The national police force issued a alert warning computer troublemakers they will be prosecuted.
Y2K Headquarters director Zhang Qi said that 20 crucial industries, including banks, securities and electrical grids had all worked out contingency plans in case the switch to 2000 causes malfunctions.
The problems may crop up in older computers or microchips that use only two digits to record years. If they mistake ``00'' for 1900, systems may garble data or crash.
While most computers in China were made after 1995 and are believed to be Y2K-ready, viruses abound. Experts have detected at least 24 viruses timed to go off Jan. 1, the magazine Internet Weekly reported this week. Some, it added, are designed to behave like Y2K problems, making it more difficult to develop anti-viral programs.