The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC),
revealed on Monday that the nation's online community is continuing
to expand at a rapid pace, with 8.9 million new users in the first
half of the year.
China's Internet population hit 68 million at the end of June,
the second highest number in the world, following the United
States. The latest official statistics reported the figure was only
8.9 million by the end of 2000 and 620,000 in 1997.
The figures were released on Monday by the government-funded
CNNIC in its latest report, the most authoritative data on the
Chinese Internet industry.
It is the 12th report released by the center since 1997.
Experts attribute the fast increase in the number of Internet
users to the government's efforts to build up infrastructure and
restructure the telecom industry.
According to the report, 25.72 million computers are connected
to the Internet in China. There are almost 473,900 websites,
including 250,651 websites with the domain suffix ".cn."
"Cyberspace has become a force to be reckoned with in China,"
said Qian Hualin, a senior Internet analyst from the Chinese
Academy of Sciences.
Netizens between the ages of 18 and 30 remain the driving force,
but this age group's share of the whole community dropped steeply
from 91 percent in 1998 to 56 percent at the end of June.
This decrease was attributed to the steady growth in numbers of
adults aged 35 and older who are using the Internet, according to
the report, which is released twice a year, Qian said.
The report also offers some interesting figures about the
behavior of Chinese Internet users.
Chinese people spend 13 hours surfing the Internet every week on
average with the period from 8 pm to 11 pm becoming prime time. The
major reason for them to surf the web is to obtain information or
have fun.
CNNIC reported 28.6 percent of interviewees used the Internet
for leisure, a massive gain from 7 percent in 1998.
However, only 0.2 percent of the respondents picked online
shopping and e-business as their main activity online.
As China's Internet users use e-mails as a major communication
channel, they are increasingly finding that most of their e-mails
are no longer personal -- an average of 8.3 e-mails out of 16 they
receive every week are junk mail.
Most of the junk mail comes from domestic e-mail servers because
of their default open relay function, giving people the opportunity
to use them as transfer stations to send unsolicited mail, said
CNNIC official Wang En'hai.
(China Daily July 22, 2003)