On April 20, 1994, China connected to the internet. Getting there wasn’t straightforward. To reach that moment, Hu Qiheng and her team had to solve a problem that seemed impossible: connect the country to the global network without the supercomputers the United States and Japan had refused to sell them eight years earlier.
Who Is Hu Qiheng?
Born in 1934 in Beijing, she studied at the Moscow Institute of Chemical Machinery during the years of the Sino-Soviet alliance and graduated in 1963. Back in China, she joined the Chinese Academy of Sciences and spent decades working in automation, pattern recognition, and artificial intelligence.
Between 1987 and 1996 she served as Vice President of the institution — one of the highest technical positions in the country. Her career placed her at the center of decisions about digital infrastructure at the exact moment China was defining its place in the technological world being built around it.
The Supercomputer Problem
In 1986, the United States and Japan agreed not to sell supercomputers to China. For a country trying to build its own academic network and connect to the internet, that was a serious obstacle. Supercomputers were the backbone of early networks.
Hu Qiheng led the team behind the National Computing and Networking Facility of China (NCFC). Their solution was to recreate the necessary capabilities with available resources, distribute the processing across six different organizations, and build an architecture that didn’t depend on what they couldn’t have. It’s the same logic behind integrating technology into a business on a limited budget: work with what exists, build toward what’s needed.
The Washington Trip That Changed Everything
In 1994, Hu Qiheng traveled to Washington D.C. for a scientific collaboration conference at the National Science Foundation. The relationships she built there opened the door: China secured a 64K international connection through Sprint Corporation, and on April 20, 1994, the country made its first full connection to the internet.
It was a modest connection by today’s standards. But it was the first thread of what is now the world’s largest internet network by number of users. As the Internet Hall of Fame documents, Hu’s role wasn’t just technical — she was the person who built the institutional bridges that made it happen.
After the Connection
Hu Qiheng didn’t stop there. In 1995 she led the restructuring of the Computer Network Information Center under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1997 she drove the creation of CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), which manages the .cn domain and centralizes internet services in the country.
In 2013 she was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame as a Global Connector — the same ceremony as Ida Holz. Two women, two regions of the world, both recognized the same year for building the internet from the inside. Her full profile at the World Internet Conference details how her work shaped not just China’s connectivity, but the governance frameworks that followed. That’s also why the gender gap in tech matters so much at the institutional level: the people shaping the rules tend to be the ones who built the infrastructure.
The Story That Gets Left Out
The history of the internet is usually told as an American story — ARPANET, MIT labs, Silicon Valley. Hu Qiheng is part of the missing narrative: the people who took that technology, overcame the obstacles others put in their path, and made it work for their own context. That’s also how the internet was built.
This is the seventh installment of the Women Who Built Technology series. You can also read the entries on Radia Perlman, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, Hedy Lamarr, and Ida Holz.
