It isn’t expected to start nibbling away at computer data systems until the docks click over to 2000, but the millennium bug has been crawling on the nerves of information technology (IT) workers around the world for some time. And when the 21st century began its one-year countdown, an alarm dock was set for people everywhere to debug their computers to survive any system failures that the new century may trigger. 'The scale of the problem can never be overestimated,' said 2hang Qi, director of the IT Products Administration Department under the Ministry of Information Industries. 'In China, where some 10 million computers are presently at work, there is plenty of work that urgently needs to be done.' Official reports say that most of the country's Y2K (Year 2000)-vulnerable sectors, like banks, securities exchanges and aviation industry as well as computer users in big cities, have already fixed their computers for the year 2000 and are now at the stage of testing the new systems. But them are sectors and regions that are lagging in their preparation. 'Whatever reasons they have, all government computer systems should be fixed by March, and tests completed by September,' said Zhang. Even if this time-frame. is adhered to, it cannot guarantee the normal function of computers by the year 2000, according to experts. Although systems may be free of the millennium bug, exchanges made to eradicate the bug could themselves ta~gger untold side-effects. 'My personal understanding is that many companies do not comprehend the urgency of the situation. They think one year is still a long time,' said Professor IA Mingshu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Ironically enough, the Year 2000 problem was caused by people’s same misunderstanding of how fast time elapses. In the early days of computing, many programmers, assuming their programs would be redundant by 2000, conserved valuable memory space by representing years with only two digits (for example, 99 rather than 1999). The practice causes programs that perform. arithmetic operations to yield incorrect results when working with years outside the range of 1900-1999. The scope of the Year 2000 challenge spans the entire IT industry. A data mismatch can exist in any level of hardware or software from microcode to application programs, in files and databases, and might be present on any platform. Just imagine if in the first quarter of the year 2000 your company cannot process its 1999 end of-year billing or end-of-year payroll properly your corporate credit card holders are refused most transactions because their accounts appear delinquent your 1999 year-end profit data cannot be calculated properly and your utility companies cut off their services due to your apparent late bin payments. China's official war against the millennium bug was started in 1995 with corporate actions beginning one year later at the Bank of China. 'So far, all the important systems have been fixed,' said Doctor Liu Shuzhong of the bank's Year 2000 Project Office. I Au added that the bank has prepared backup facilities to guarantee the normal function of the whole system in case anything urgent happens at the mm of the century. 'Our ultimate goal is to protect the interests of our customers,' he said. Alongside efforts from computer users to debug their systems, IT manufacturers have also participated in the war against the millennium bug. I-Lin Chow, manager of IBM China year 2000 Project Office, said that her company has been trying every means possible in the past few years to help its Chinese clients solve the Y2K problems. 'We have opened many training courses on how to solve the problem. We' re also providing various forms of technical support for our clients,' she said. While most attention to solving the Y2K problem has been focused on the IT industry, some experts predict that the mill