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The Internet

China Has Largest On-Line Population 132

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that-didn't-take-long dept.
Smivs writes "China now has the world's largest net-using population, say official figures. More than 253 million people in the country are now online, according to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). About 95% of those going online connect via high-speed links. Take up of broadband has been boosted by deals offered by China's fixed line phone firms as they fight to win customers away from mobile operators. Despite having a greater number of people online, China's net economy still has a long way to go to match or exceed that of the US or even that of South Korea. Figures from Analysis International said China's net firms reported total revenues of $5.9bn (£2.96bn) in 2007. By contrast, net advertising revenue alone for US firms in 2007 stood at $21.2bn (£10.6bn)."
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China Has Largest On-Line Population More

China Has Largest On-Line Population

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  • Inflation. (Score:5, Informative)

    by FatSean ( 18753 ) on Monday July 28, 2008 @07:34AM (#24366961) Homepage Journal

    Didn't we just have a story about how advertising on the web is way over-valued?

    I wouldn't trust the Chinese government to report on the color of the sky, but I suppose there are ways to validate their claims.

    • Well being that the population is well over 1.3 billion people So only one in 5 Chinese are online. Which isn't really that good. Being the most populated country in the world and not having the largest Online Population is kinda silly. I would suspect fairly soon India will be #2

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kabocox ( 199019 )

      I wouldn't trust the Chinese government to report on the color of the sky, but I suppose there are ways to validate their claims.

      I'm very mixed on that comment. I don't know if I'd "trust" any national government to put out accurate stats about itself. I'd have to trust them all to lie somewhat equally though. If a government lies or stretches the truth too much it'll be found it. It's much easier long term to just put out stats that you have reasonable faith in.

      (That still doesn't mean that the stats right

      • Re:Inflation. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Sigismundo ( 192183 ) on Monday July 28, 2008 @08:31AM (#24367619)

        NPR's On The Media ran a great story about the media in China a few months ago. Well worth a listen. One of the interesting things they noted was that while reporting on national issues is often self-censored due to fear of reprisal, on the provincial and local level it is possible to do hard-hitting investigative reporting on neighboring areas.

        Not much of this stuff ever hits the Western mainstream media, but it is there, and it's made an impact. Censorship on a national level is still a huge problem in China, but there are reporters out there doing good work, and getting that work published.

        Here is a link [onthemedia.org] to a partial transcript of the show.

        • That's exactly the impression you can get if you just follow any Chinese news portal for a small while. But who cares! All we need is to drum up exaggerated accusations which will reinforce with the popular anti-China sentiment mutually.

          While there is this and few other more balanced stories published here and there, they will never go to the front page, just like the tons of anti-government comments you can see in a Chinese discussion forum would never make to the FP. Same effect, different paths.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      When they tell you that the sky isn't blue, they may not be consciously lying. Have you seen the pollution in Beijing?

  • Does it count if it's not unfettered access? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wild_quinine ( 998562 ) on Monday July 28, 2008 @07:35AM (#24366965)
    It's one thing to say that China has the largest on-line population, and it's an interesting factoid. But I'm not sure it counts as net access, since it is somewhat (as in noticably) restricted as such. With all due respect that's like saying that the USA has the highest proportion of outdoor workers in the western world, because most of the offices have clean windows and sometimes you can see a few trees.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by betterunixthanunix ( 980855 )
      Within the borders of China, there is the world's largest number of connected computer users. The fact that their communications across the border is restricted doesn't change the fact that they are online, it just means that they are not online in a "global" sense. Really, within China, the policing of the Internet is done by citizens who are following the laws of that nation; it is a stricter version of laws that require hosting services to take down kiddie porn here in the US. I'm not saying that Chin

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by dnwq ( 910646 )
      It's massively important because these online Chinese can still visit many, many sites - they might not be able to go to pages with political content, but they can still support Chinese Ebays and Craigslists and whatnot.

      Frankly it's likely that Digg and Slashdot have vastly larger Chinese equivalents, and most /.ers would have no idea because they don't read Chinese.

      And political discussion still goes on, albeit through euphemisms and with some care. The restrictions exist, but they're not all that ef
    • please tell the US that Nazi rightist pages should be censored. And a few Sex pages do not make your youth become murders, but violent games and websites do! At least China and the US both censor Sex-related pages! And the US killed many to in the last few years - just not in front of the White house, but in the Twin Towers. I would love to see the number of occurences of severe violence exchanged with the number of sex-scenes and vice versa. Make love not war!
  • ... just an hour after viewing internet prOn, they need to get back online and view more.
  • If they're stuck behind that big ass firewall of theirs?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by stewbacca ( 1033764 )

      If they're stuck behind that big ass firewall of theirs?

      The Great Firewall of China...visible from space!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by duvel ( 173522 )
        The Great Firewall of China...visible from space!

        Small correction: The Great Wall of China is visible from space (which is amazing enough in itself) but the Great Firewall of China is visible from routers on the other site of the earth! Imagine that!

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by BPPG ( 1181851 )

        The Great Firewall of China...visible from cyberspace!

        fixed

    • Technically, if they have more Internet presence, it is us who are stuck behind their firewall.

    • People who care about information/knowledge in mainland China actually install softwares to bypass the firewall. And people who post in forums actually used many different methods to bypass the stupid software censors. When the no. of people going on line is in such huge number, it's impossible to check it all. And as people's understanding and caring on their rights granted by laws increases over time, with the no. of people online, it'll become unstopable force. In fact, you can see that force growing in

  • USA! USA! USA! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    At least the United States still holds both titles for "Largest Uncensored On-Line Population" and "Largest Monitored On-Line Population."

    Take that, People's Republic of What's Left of Chairman Mao!

    • Largest Uncensored On-Line Population

      That's right! I can say whatever I want! I can even say that In Iraq, Bush &*&)&(&)(*&()&)(&(F*&(R*# nikmkam sf,d. f,/. ....
      Nothing to see here. Move along.

      • You do realize that if you'd lived in China and tried that little joke of yours about Mao, you'd be someplace like the local Super Happy Peace and Harmony facility, crouching on the concrete floor trying to put your teeth back in.

        In absolute terms, people have lots more personal freedoms in the US of A compared to China. Now if we look at the trends, that's another story...

        • Actually, from what I heard from friends in China or were in China, people just don't really care about jokes about that guy these days except some communist officals in more offical events. I've seen soft jokes (in the form of pics and text) about the communist leaders passing everywhere online amoung Chinese communities even on forums in mainland China. I just don't think those people cares at all.
          • Yes. The parent poster is a victim of American propaganda spread about China by the U.S. government through media outlets in the hopes of
            1. Making China look particularly bad in terms of civil and human rights so that the U.S. can somehow justify its particularly hard-line stance against its own major trading partner and
            2. Making citizens in the U.S. feel more comfortable about the civil and human rights that have been taken away from them in the interests of 'combating terrorism.'

            If you actually talk to p

    • Actually, I would be surprised if we were the largest monitored population. I would suspect China takes that award. There's no telling what the Russians are up to today as well.

  • But... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NuKeLiTe ( 418 ) on Monday July 28, 2008 @07:41AM (#24367045) Homepage

    How about the restrictions they have?

    How can you count one "online person" when this person can't visit many of the most popular sites on the net and doesn't generates all the in/out traffic that the rest of us create?

  • Even if it sounds impressive because that's almost as many people with internet connections as America has altogether it's still only right around 20% of their total population. I'd find a country with 90% of their population regularly using the internet to be a lot more impressive.

  • News at 11 (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 28, 2008 @07:47AM (#24367101)

    China Has Largest * Population

  • Just what we need.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Monday July 28, 2008 @07:48AM (#24367111) Journal

    Just what we need, more people for the "human flesh search engine", the name given to people who hunt down those who say unpopular or anti-party sentiments. See here [timesonline.co.uk].

    This has been used to find unpopular people. From selfish idiots commenting about the earthquake, to Chinese students abroad supporting Tibetan independence. They and their family are then subject to harassment until they repent.

    Sorry, I just heard about this, and I'm pissed. This is what totalitarian one-party states are about, you're either "one of us" or you're marginalized until you can no longer function in society.

    This may be a great leap backward.

    Fortunately, we have sites like EastSouthWestNorth [zonaeuropa.com] to sift through the state party-line bullshit and bring us stories like this [zonaeuropa.com].

    -molo

    • This has been used to find unpopular people. They and their family are then subject to harassment until they repent.

      This is different from the Daily Kos how exactly?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jc42 ( 318812 )

      FWIW, I decided to google that phrase, and was disappointed that "human flesh search engine" got only 755 hits. It seemed funny that there would be so little mention of it online, so I tried hunting down the actual Chinese phrase. Translating it back to Chinese took a minute or so, mostly because there's no "engine" in the Chinese. The phrase turns out to be "", which will probably be garbled by /.'s software (and it's time for another request for permission to use UTF-8 ;-). The pinyin is "ren2 rou4 so

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by molo ( 94384 )

        Interesting, thanks for the research. But please read more of the accounts. The popular ones are the one about the selfish TV earthquake person, and the woman who killed a kitten with her high heels. I suspect these are popularized because they are seen as worthy of retaliation. The stories of harassment over political speech aren't as widely reported, but are there also (from my bit of reading in english).

        Yes, this kind of action is not limited to China, but couple it with a society that forces everyon

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jc42 ( 318812 )

          The Chinese authorities will do nothing about this as long as the mob is enforcing its Maoist goals. That will happen as long as the government still has popular support (which it continues to have, unfortunately).

          Yeah, probably. But this attitude long predates Maoism, going back to Confucianism which emphasizes this sort of social control. And lots of people are pointing out that the current Chinese rulers are Maoist about like American rulers are Christian: They use the words for their social effects,

  • How many computer users now? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by suso ( 153703 ) * on Monday July 28, 2008 @07:48AM (#24367119) Journal

    Strange. I was just trying to find out how many computer users there are worldwide. I can't get a good estimate.

    • you mean actual persons using computers? or the total number of individual user accounts on all the computers?

      Here's mine:

      $ wc -l /etc/passwd
      45 /etc/passwd

      But this is on my personal laptop ;-)

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • They can't read this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PetiePooo ( 606423 ) on Monday July 28, 2008 @07:51AM (#24367149)
    Tiananmen Square Massacre!
    Tiananmen Square Massacre!
    Tiananmen Square Massacre!

    They're not online enough to read this comment... Does that really count as online?

    <retrospect>Was that cruel? I figured it as a way to invoke curiosity when they think they're going to an article about something good, and they end up being blocked by that stupid firewall...</retrospect>

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My Lai Massacre!
      My Lai Massacre!
      My Lai Massacre!

      I have no ploblems accessing this flom china.

      • Touché!

        We all have forefathers that have done things we're not so proud of. Witness Manifest Destiny [wikipedia.org] as another I'm not particularly fond of...

        My intent was not to just bring up a sore spot in your nation's history, but rather to point out that your current government continues to try to conceal it.

        I'm traveling in Berlin at the moment, and one thing that stands out is how the Germans openly discuss the past two world wars and their parts in them without shame. Its a part of their history,

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hey you just killed my internet connection you insensitive clod! Now I have to use this slow proxy...

  • It supports Hanzi characters but not ascii
  • They have the most users online, but can these users even read slashdot?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by gzipped_tar ( 1151931 )

      Here I am, reading /.

      Many of my fellow Chinese don't read slashdot because:
      * they can't read English (Most of them);
      * they are not interested in the topics (News for nerds);
      * they prefer other sites such as ArsTechnica etc (Some of them don't feel good in the slashdot atmosphere).
      Or
      * They can read /. but can't express their opinions fluently in English. So they don't show up by sending in their comments.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jc42 ( 318812 )

        They can read /. but can't express their opinions fluently in English.

        Tell them that they'll fit right in here.

        (Hmm ... What happens if you translate that word-for-word into Chinese characters?)

  • Big deal. (Score:1, Redundant)

    by Nullav ( 1053766 )

    With a population of ~1.3 billion, 253 billion people online is just terrible.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by pxc ( 938367 )

      It's not just terrible, it's impossible!

      An implosion of the universe would be terrible indeed.

  • About 95% of those going online connect to 86% of the Internet via high-speed links.

  • 99% of them... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gmac63 ( 12603 )

    So they have the largest online population. Of course, it would be that 99% of them are members of the Chinese Communist Party [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_China].

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Firehed ( 942385 )

      Who cares if they're communists? If they don't subscribe to free market economics, that's their business. It's the completely unrelated fact that China's government are a bunch of overbearing, censorship-obsessed crazies that you want to watch out for.

  • In the words of The Hon'ble Mr. Smith.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by l0cust ( 992700 ) on Monday July 28, 2008 @08:47AM (#24367857) Journal
    What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?
  • mmm Largest online pollution .... after water, air, ground ... they moved to the internet and started to pollute that also ...

  • Speed of internet access (Score:5, Informative)

    by FooBarWidget ( 556006 ) on Monday July 28, 2008 @08:58AM (#24367991)

    It's impressive that 95% of the population has high-speed Internet, but "high-speed" is limited to within the country only. Links to foreign countries are slow - VERY slow. Especially to U.S. sites. It took a very long time to load Slashdot.

    That said, the links within the country are insanely fast - and cheap. People over there don't even use Bittorrent: they host all their movies on public HTTP servers. Bandwidth is so cheap that they don't even need Bittorrent. There is even some kind of urban myth over there which says that Bittorrent will wear off your hard drive because of excessive hard drive activity.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) *
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • > There is even some kind of urban myth over there which says that Bittorrent will wear off your hard drive because of excessive hard drive activity.

      About five years ago this was a widespread rumor among Windows users, perhaps because of the old Windows filesystem being prone to heavy fragmentation. I have never tested myself, though.

  • Figures from Analysis International said China's net firms reported total revenues of $5.9bn

    I'm guessing that doesn't include the gold miners, etc, in World of Warcraft et al.!

  • We better make a china.slashdot.org or the chinese /. equivalent will be able to DoS us!

  • 1/7th of the world's population, it would make sense that you have the most participants, right?

  • Unexpectedly, Tuvalu (official population of around 11,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvalu [wikipedia.org]) is the second largest online population. Go figure.

  • What a coincidence, I just checked Wikipedia and it seems that China also has the world's largest overall population. How strange.

  • I wonder how many of these lines are used for business oriented links with webfarms as long as the eye can see, botting on hundreds of diff. games to make an economy worth while for some chinese population trying to make a small living.

    The chinese gov. has admitted that gaming is a big economy for them right now.
    I wonder if used only legit traffic, and remove gaming traffic, if it would be as high

  • China also has the worlds largest in-line and out of line population. Whats the big story here?

  • Figures from Analysis International said China's net firms reported total revenues of $5.9bn (£2.96bn) in 2007. By contrast net advertising revenue alone for US firms in 2007 stood at $21.2bn (£10.6bn)."
     
    Not as much profit to be made when you're in China, buying products made in China.

  • So how do we know what people are measuring when they claim that country C has some number U of internet users? I can't tell from this or any other article I've seen on the topic how they define a user. As far as I can tell, they don't distinguish a person who has used the Internet once from a person who works full time on the Internet.

    Is there any actual meaning to such supposed measurements? Or should we just consider them as meaningless PR?

  • The real question is: How many of them are farming gold on WoW?
  • We had big dreams for the internet back in the 80s and 90s, we haven't really won the war for freedom of information if almost a quarter of the worlds 'internet' users are behind a highly censored firewall. I'd go with the above implications here that it's hard to say china's net users are really net users considering the narrow pipe with which they can talk to the rest of the real internets. A friend of mine in china was speculating the internet at the media village costs so much because they have to pay
  • For those of you familar...Homer is asking Flanders "I thought you had cable?". Flanders replies, yep, 493 channels....blocked out. The only channels he had were religious and the weather channel. Kind of reminds me what China's internet is probably like. Yep, unlimited access! You only get to the web sites WE want you to see. So, given China's population, I bet they have more internet users, but, they don't have the FREEDOM to see the TRUE internet.
    • correction: China is using blacklist, not whitelist. Now if there are only 30 sites on the net, that won't make a difference, but luckily there are a few more than 30.

  • It is strange to see - although not at all surprising - how a group of people make a heroic effort to explain away facts now on /.: "A person is not online unless (s)he can access the same crap everybody else can". Wow, you guys really have found "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". Last time I looked 'online' simply meant 'connected to the internet'; but then I am not the guy who has got it all sussed, of course.

    Funny how some seem to think - or perhaps it is not so much thinking as knee

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