Monday, February 10, 2003		Feature

China surges in online population too

A Chinese worker assembles computer parts at a Taiwanese-owned BenQ (IT) Co., Ltd. plant in Suzhou 80 km from Shanghai. China’s online population rose to 59.1 million at the end of 2002, replacing Japan’s 56 million as the world’s second largest, but still far behind the USA with nearly 170 million Internet users, China Internet Network Information Centre said. It also predicted Chinese Net surfers would jump 46 per cent to 86.3 million in 2003.

WITH 59.1 million Internet users, China is now second only to the USA, which has a whopping 170 million users, in terms of online population.

And though the country witnessed a whopping 75 per cent increase in its online population in 2002, China accounted for 6.63 per cent of global Internet traffic, far behind American users who accounted for 42.65 per cent, said WebSideStory Inc, a California-based supplier of Internet tracking software.

According to data from the online statistics agency China Internet Network Information Centre, another 27 million Chinese would get online this year, bringing the total to 86 million.

A total of 20.8 million computers had access to the Internet at the end of 2002, up by 66 per cent from a year earlier.

The number of Internet domain names using the country’s .cn suffix has reached 179,000, up by 41 per cent from 2001.

But despite the Chinese claim to second place in the world, it is more likely that China and Japan run neck and neck.

About 60 million Japanese, or half the country’s population, access the Internet, previous statistics have shown.