The global Internet has now become an ever so powerful information carrier in many countries. However, only very few regional networks in China are connected to the Internet. To change this situation, the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) project has been established. CERNET consists of a nation-wide backbone which is connected to the global Internet, eight regional networks and more than 1,000 campus networks. Due to the huge population in China, CERNET will dramatically increase the number of users in the Internet community. In this paper, the plan and implementation of CERNET will be discussed. The overall objective of the CERNET project is to build Internet in China to satisfy the current users and to cater for the development in the coming century.