http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/1...3,00030010.htm

Press Trust of India
Beijing, May 27

Internet users with a good command of Chinese but a poor grasp of English can now visit Web sites by typing in domain names in Chinese characters, a report said on Tuesday.

The service was introduced by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) on Monday, the China Daily reported.

"By typing http://domain name (in Chinese characters).Cn, one can visit the target Web site," a CNNIC official said.

The official said millions of Chinese people have long been deprived of using the Web simply because they had to use English to find native language sites.

The CNNIC is now promoting domain name registration involving the suffix ".Cn."

Domain name registration has been increasing steadily in China. Statistics show that about 80 to 90 per cent of Chinese users have registered their domain names with the foreign ".Com" or ".Net" suffixes.

The number of domain names with the ".Cn" suffix had grown from 4,066 in 1997 to around 150,000 by the end of May.

China had 59.1 million Internet users by the end of last year, the second largest in the world after the United States, and had 20.83 million computers connected to the Internet.