|
.Baz, via Flickr (CC license)
There's a second wave of growth in Chinese Internet usage. |
China's Internet usage has broken a few new records, according to a report in
China Tech News about the December 2007 figures from China's official Internet bean counters (
China Internet network Information Center). The total number of Net users has risen to 210 million -- a 30 percent increase (72 million) in the last year.
That amount of growth was pretty common when the government decided to open up China to the Internet in the late 1990s, back when the initial number of Chinese net users was pretty small. Growth percentages eased downwards as the total number of net users grew. Only in the past few years, and especially in the second half of 2007, growth has sped up again.
In just the past year, the total number of Chinese net users has grown from 12 to 16 percent of the total population. Back in China's first few years of net access, most growth came from larger cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou). Today, many second- and third-tier cities are joining the frenzy.
The current growth spurt is likely to continue for some time. It might take another decade before the Chinese Internet market to show signs of saturation. But this growth does cause some problems -- the millions of newcomers each year make it very hard to develop standards or codes of conduct that are shared by the majority of Chinese net users.
Also remarkable is the fast growth of China's mobile Internet users. In December 2007, more than 50 million wireless users were recorded, even though 3G access is still far away and mobile Internet is flaky at best in China. When affordable 3G takes off in this country -- as is expected -- mobile Internet might overtake conventional connections very quickly.
