China is one of those countries where internet censorship is practiced in one of the stricter possible ways. Even then, the number of internet users in the country has been increasing at a rapid speed. Chine Internet Network Information Center or CINIC, the government authorized organization for regulating internet service in the country has recently conducted a study based on a number of statistics and has confirmed afterwards that after a whopping number of 28,000,000 of uniquely new users have entered into the internet world in the last half of the year 2011, the total number of Internet users in China have came past a remarkable 500 million mark.
In fact, by the end of the 2011, the estimated Chinese Internet population was around 513 million representing a fact that about 38% of the country’s total population is now connected to the Internet, and this is around a 4% increase if compared to the last year. Along with this total internet population increase, the number of people accessing Internet using mobile devices has also increased a lot reaching a milestone of about 355 million users by the end of the year. Based on the current situation, the statistics say that about 69.3% of China’s current internet population use internet using their mobile devices. And in fact this number is a huge increase as it is about 66.2% up from 2010. In fact, the growing number of smart phone availability is working behind the reactor for this increase. All the smart phone producers companies have recently been trying to introduce new and easy technologies for internet access to attract more customer and the use of android OS and the increased popularity of free or affordable android marketplace have also stirred the interest in the people to get a smart phone and use internet.
The number of people in China who is using Internet through their desktop machine are also drastically decreasing and has dropped to only 73.4%, however, the number of users accessing internet using the laptops have remained steady. Although the number of total users have increased, it is assumed that the rate of growth of internet users have started to slow down. The analysts of the industry assumes that the reason behind this slow pace of growth is that most of the Chinese citizens with the age ranging from 10 to 29, who are the most potential internet users have already started to use internet by now. In the mean time, the older people are most likely not to show much interest on using internet unless their families are keen on internet.
There are various reasons why the people in China are using internet for. The most common reasons for what people want to get connected to the internet are instant messaging services, using search engines, listening to online radios and music, watching streaming video services etc. Actually, the study also pointed out that the increased internet use has also resulted in the growth of micro blogs. As for example, the number of people using micro blogs in China have gone past the milestone of 250 million and this is about four times more than the number of 63 million users in 2010.