Slashdot Mirror
China's Internet Boom
morn writes "BBC News is reporting that China's 'online population' is booming, with 20 million people expected to be 'connected' by the end of the year, each spending an average of 17 hours [per week] online. This is despite surveys showing that Beijing residents account for more than 20% of users, with just 14% of mainland Chinese knowing what the Internet is. Read the full story here. "
I do not understand why should "20 M chinese on net" be a "big news", unless it is meant as: Look, there are still ONLY 20 M chinese with internet access!
This is less than 2 percent of the chinese population, and my first thought was "this estimate is much too low". However, after taking a look at the CIA-factbook, I am ready to believe it. Their 1998 estimate for China is: 105 milions of telephones (compare this with US, with 180M telephones and 1/4-th of the chinese population)! Adding the Hong-Kong does not change the situation much: 1998 estimate for HK is 4.5M telephones.
Lets see...20 million of 1.3 billion is...
About 1.5 percent of the population.
Thats a boom alright.
Not really. Last time I was there (last year) I could pretty much get any content I wanted. There are tons of proxies and resourceful people always find new ways to get whatever information they want. For that matter, I once walked into one of the cyber cafes there and by default, they were already configured to go through proxies.
I used the same proxy for the 2 years I was there without it ever being blocked. I don't think they're quite that vigilant.
The gov't blocks using IP numbers I believe, since I could always resolve URLs but not connect to them. That makes it really difficult to block things if you constantly move your site around. It was only really useful for blocking the big, well-known sites like cnn.com or WSJ. Course, things might have changed since the Falungong stuff.