E-Marketing in Minneapolis David Vinge, eMarketing Dashboard : China's Online Population Explosion

Thursday, December 20, 2007

China's Online Population Explosion


There are now an estimated 137 million Internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current Internet population range from 165 million to 210 million. The growth rate of China's internet user population has been outpacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years.

The influx of tens of millions of new online participants each year can be expected to have far-reaching consequences for the people of China, for its government and economy, and for the larger world. At the very least, the Internet will offer ever greater numbers of Chinese a much more sophisticated information and communications world than the one they currently inhabit. And because the Chinese share a single written language, despite the multiplicity of spoken tongues, it could have a unifying effect on the country's widely dispersed citizenry.

Read more from the Pew Research Center Web site on the size and direction of growth of China's online population.

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