January 14th, 2009
CNNIC: China Leads the World With 298 Million Internet Users
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I have been searching for the English version of the China Internet Network Information Center’s (CNNIC) 23rd Statistical Survey Report on Internet Development in China (PDF in Chinese) ever since I saw this Associated Press release earlier today, but the English version of the CNNIC website only has the 22nd report.
My student James Chen has culled out some important data from the Chinese version of the CNNIC report –
- There are 298 million internet users in China, up 41.3% from last year.
- Internet penetration in China is 22.6%, higher than the world average of 21.9%.
- The growth rate of rural Internet users was 60.8%, much higher than that of urban users which was 35.6%.
- 90.6% of Internet users get online by means of a broadband connection.
China is now way ahead of the United States in terms of the number of Internet users. The United States has an estimated 223.1 million internet users, with a penetration of 71%. However, the financial size of China’s online market is still smaller than that of the United States.
On Monday, I had asked my class to “imagine a world where the Chinese dominate social media by sheer size.” It seems that imagining such a scenario is becoming easier with each passing month.
The next language I’ll learn won’t be French, or Spanish or German; it will be Chinese.
Update 1: BBC quotes some more interesting statistics from the report –
- 117.6 million Chinese accessed the internet using their mobile phones last year, up 133% from 2007. 43.5% of Chinese students use their mobile phones to access the internet.
- 234 million people in China surfed the internet to read or watch news by the end of 2008, up from 155 million in 2007.
- There are 162 million bloggers in China!
