News perspective: The white paper "China's National Defense in 2006" devotes a whole chapter to a detailed introduction of China's border and coastal defense construction, and puts forward "adhering to the principles of conducting overall planning, placing equal emphasis on land and sea, giving priority to defense, and integrating defense and administration, China is endeavoring to make its border and coastal defense unified, effective, solid and informationized." "Informationized border and coastal defense" has now become one of the overall objectives of China's border and coastal defense consturction.

　　Border and coastal defense is crucial to a country. In case a war breaks out, some chain reactions, such as border counterattack or border control and border blockade actions, are most likely to set off. Whether the border and coastal defense can be held fast depends, to a large extent, on the level of informationalization of the border and coastal defense. At the same time we must realize that as the economy in the border areas are relatively backward with less information resources, which in turn will adversely affect and restrict informationalization drive of border and coastal defense in varying degrees. Therefore, in order to rise up to the challenges of new military changes in the world and meet the requirements of being capable of winning information-based war, informationalization drive of border and coastal defense should be carried out without delay.

　　The main tasks of the border and coastal defense troops and militia are to patrol and perform guard duties and manage emergencies in peace time. In wartime, they are tasked to control and seal the border and participate in frontier defense battles. In our efforts to intensify informationalization drive of border and coastal defense, we should give due consideration to both peacetime and wartime requirements, to establish communication contact with the departments of security, public security, frontier armed police in border areas and to provide accurate and reliable information to the decision-making bodies of the local Party committees, governments and military commands.

　　Informationalization drive of border and coastal defense has its own specific characteristics. Border areas are complicated in social situations and alive with penetration activities. These places are also the distribution places and the places for exchange of intelligences and information of various countries, thus the struggle of stealing secret information and anti-stealing of secret information, and penetration and anti-penetration is especially fierce in the border areas. Hence strict information transmission and report system and strict secrecy system shall be established. In the Informationalization drive, we must stick to the development road of "combing military purposes with civilian purposes and reserving the military capabilities in civilian potentials" and develop an emergency command system, which can not only meet the demands of managing emergencies, but also satisfy the needs of border control and army-civilian joint defense.

　　By Zhang Xicheng and Xia Jihong

　　(Jan 10, PLA Daily)