Beijing: China now has more than half a billion billion people of new Web surfers go online using mobile phones and tablet computers.
According to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), at the end of 2012 the population of China with access to the Internet had surpassed the half a billion mark.
The weibos have become hugely popular platforms for people to vent their anger over perceived injustices or corruption and organise and spread news of protests, posing a challenge to government attempts to control information.
Almost 56 million Chinese equivalent to nearly the population of Britain used the Internet for the first time in 2011, taking the country’s vast online population to 513 million.
The CNNIC said that the number of people using more traditional communication tools such as emails, web forums or blogs was falling as the weibos grew in popularity.
Rural Internet use rose by 8.9 percent last year to 136 million people, but huge disparities still exist between rich and poor regions, the data shows.
While more than 70 percent of Beijing’s population used the Internet last year, only 24.2 percent of people went online in the southwestern province of Guizhou, the poorest in China.
The number of people surfing the web on mobile phones reached 356 million in 2011, up by nearly 53 million, the industry group said.
And whereas more than 30 percent of school children and students go online, only 0.7 percent of government and Communist Party cadres do, it added.
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