Chinese Web Population Grows 30% in 2006; Hits 132 Million Surfers
Tuesday, 02 January 2007
China’s Internet population increased by 30 percent in the past 12 months, according to the state news agency Xinhua. That raises the total number of Chinese surfers to 132 million out of a total population of 1.3 billion.
The growth in China has been driven by the country's booming economy, as well as the huge number of internet cafes that have made the web popular among ordinary Chinese people.
The number of people accessing the Web via high-speed broadband connections rose to 52 million.
China now is the second-largest population of Internet users in the world after the US, which has an online census of 207 million. There are more than a billion Internet users around the globe, dominated by the US and Europe, which has 308 million users across nearly 50 countries.
But according to Buzzle.com, while online growth in the west is beginning to tail off, the speed of development in countries such as China and India is increasing. Despite such growth there are still widespread concerns about state censorship of the Web in China. The government operates restrictions on sites that can be accessed from inside the country, and has clamped down on political dissidents using the internet to communicate with each other.