The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a non profit state network information center founded in 1997, recently released its year end report on development of the Internet in China. Based on that report the number of Chinese Internet users reached 210 million in 2007. This was an increase of more than 73 million over the past year. Approximately 50 million users access the Internet through mobile phones andincrease of about 6 million users in the last six months.
In additon to the number of Internet users, the report looks at online behavior of Internet users in China. You can download the report but it is in Chinese. Thanks to Tangos at the China Web2.0 Review blog for highlighting these facts;
About 34% users access Internet in Internet cafe, most of them(74.8%) are users with high school education or below. Internet cafe is more popular in rural area, about 48% rural Internet users will use Internet cafe.
The most popular online service is online music, about 86.6% netizens use online music, followed by IM (81.4%), online movies (76.9%), online news (73.6%), search engine (72.4%), online gaming (59.3%) and email (56.5%). If compared with previous report, the usage rates of online music, IM, online movies and online gaming all increased significantly.
23.5% users have their own blogs or spaces, that is about 49.35 million bloggers.
As for the first thing people will do online, IM chatting is the first choice (39.7%), followed by reading news (20%), playing games (9.3%) and search engine (7.4%), as we said before many Chinese Internet users go online just for IM chatting or playing games.
In China, IM tools is much more important than email, esp. for users aged under 25.Interestingly, the report said 48.3% people trust online news from portal sites, while only 31.4% will trust posts in blogs or BBS. For BBS, Gang Lu just published an excellent post on Chinese BBS phenomenon.
22.1% users, or 46.4 million made online shopping in last six month
35.4% users published posts in blogs or BBS. 12.7% people uploaded movies online while 10.4% uploaded short video clips online.
David Temple
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The 23rd report states that at the end of 2008 there are now 298 million users. See an English translation of the report at http://www.nanjingmarketinggroup.com/knowledge/23rd-report-internet-development-in-China