Bureaucracy Beater.(digital identification cards in China)(Brief Article)

Thirty-one year old Hong Kong businessman Alfred Wong loves golf, but the wait to join local clubs can take a decade, and he refuses to pay the $650,000 it costs to buy a membership. Instead, once a week Wong makes the one-hour commute to the Chinese city of Shenzhen to play one of the many courses in the city's suburbs. They can be cheap by comparison, but Wong pays the price in another way. Shenzhen's enormous popularity among Hong Kong's bargain-hungry residents has made the border crossings a nightmare of congestion. On weekends and holidays 300,000 people can pass through the railway border in a day, causing lines several hours long. Says Wong, "Crossing the border to Shenzhen is awful. It is painful. There are so many people."

Shenzhen visitors may not have to endure this trauma for long. Starting in March 2003, the government will be issuing smart-card identification to Hong Kong residents that may make crossing the border not much harder than taking the subway. A computer chip embedded in the new cards will hold, among other data, a digital version of the bearer's thumbprint. If it matches the real one (as read by an optical scanner at the border crossing) passage is automatic--no need to show papers to an immigration officer.

Digital ID cards have received increased attention since the September 11 attacks because they are, at least in theory, more difficult to forge than conventional ID cards and they more reliably verify the owner's identity. But they're not foolproof and are expensive to issue. Hong Kong plans to spend $400 million issuing cards to 6 million residents by 2009. "This is the largest national-ID smart-card implementation in the world in terms of number of cards to be issued," says Aloysius Lee, an executive at PCCW, Hong Kong's ...