Chinese internet users at 538 million

CHINA’S POPULATION of internet users, which is already the world’s biggest, has risen strongly again, despite blocks on traffic by the “Great Firewall of China”, with data showing it has risen 11 per cent to 538 million.

This means nearly 40 per cent of the Chinese population of 1.3 billion uses the internet and driving the growth was wireless web surfing, according to a report by the state-sponsored China Internet Network Information Centre.

The big rise was in numbers who go online from mobile phones and other wireless devices – this was up 22 per cent at 388 million.

People in China like to watch movies and TV and read books on their mobile devices.

Another powerful factor behind the strong growth in internet use, especially in mobile use, is micro-blogging which in little more than three years has become enormously popular; growth quadrupling last year. About half of all Chinese internet users now use micro-blogs.

All this is without access to Twitter, the most popular microblogging platform in the world, Facebook, YouTube and other social networks, all of which are banned by Chinese censors.

For Chinese interned users the service of choice is Weibo, which is basically a Chinese version of Twitter.

These microblogs allow users to send short messages of 140 characters or fewer to their Weibo followers.

In Chinese, a character is a word or at least half a word. So this can represent a pretty long message.

The service, which has 300 million members, has become a platform for Chinese citizens to criticise the government in ways that have never been possible before.

The government recently introduced a whole raft of rules preventing the spread of online rumours on Weibo.

The Communist government has implemented a rigorous set of controls on internet content, known colloquially as the Great Firewall of China, which keeps a tight rein on politically suspect material.

At the same time, Beijing is keen to exploit the commercial freedoms the online world offers, especially in the booming e-commerce sector.

Last year, authorities tightened controls after social networking and other websites played a key role in protests that brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia.

This month, regulators tightened control over online video, telling providers they must prescreen all material before making it available.

The government complained that some online video was vulgar, pornographic or too violent.