1-31-96. WSJ: "Chinese Firewall: Beijing Seeks to Build Version of the Internet That Can Be Censored." "We've eliminated what is undesirable and kept what is good." Which is, succinctly, China's riposte to the information age, from satellite television and real-time news to the Internet. Beijing eagerly seeks the fanciest information hardware, but it fears much of the software. China, in short, is determined to do what conventional wisdom suggests is impossible: Join the information age while restricting access to information. The reason: If the Internet has proved its utility, it has also become a fluid medium for the two things China's authoritarian government most dreads, political dissent and pornography. Industry insiders say China -- which has already bought some of the most powerful equipment available, from U.S.-based Cisco Systems Inc. and Sprint International, a unit of Sprint Corp. -- ultimately aims to create a monolithic Internet backbone, centrally administered, that minimizes the threat posed by the Internet's amoeba-like structure. FYR_wal