Others News
- China to surpass U.S. on number of netizens
Date: 25-Jan-2007 Sources: (Shenzhen Daily)
CHINA is set to overtake the United States within two years as the world's largest Internet user, the government and news reports said yesterday.
China's online population grew by 23.4 percent last year to 137 million, about 10 percent of its 1.3 billion population, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) reported on its Web site.
The statistics were based on telephone sample surveys of more than 30,000 Chinese. Anyone aged over six who use the Internet for at least an hour a week on average are counted as Internet users, said the CNNIC.
'We believe it will take two years at most for China to overtake the United States,'the China Daily quoted an official of the agency, Wang Enhai, as saying.
About 210 million of the United States' 300 million people are online, according to the U.S. Government. China would reach 210 million users in two years if it keeps up a 24 percent annual growth rate. China had 111 million Internet users in January 2006, according to the Internet agency.
China also saw strong growth in wireless Internet use, with about 17 million people or 12.4 per cent of the online population using their mobile phones for access, the agency said.
Online services like e-mail, search engines, e-commerce, blogs, online news and games saw rapid development, while new technologies had brought new opportunities for the development of the Internet, Minister of Information Industry Wang Xudong has said.
Broadband users exceeded 100 million for the first time to reach 104 million, or 75.9 percent of all Internet users.
The majority of China's Internet users are male, accounting for 58.3 percent of the total. The report shows a yawning disparity between urban and rural areas.
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