China now has more than 500 million people on the Internet and
China now has more than 500 million people on the Internet and nearly half use weibos, microblogs similar to Twitter that can circumvent the country’s powerful censors, official data showed.
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.
China already had more Internet users than anywhere else in the world.
The rise in the number of people using the weibos was particularly dramatic, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) figures show, jumping to 250 million from just 63 million at the end of 2010.
China regularly blocks web content it deems politically sensitive in a vast censorship system dubbed the “Great Firewall of China” and is hugely concerned about the power of the Internet to influence public opinion.
But weibo users have been able to get around the controls by re-posting information and images as fast as the authorities can take them down.
A weibo user is believed to have broken the news of a deadly high-speed train crash in July that provoked widespread condemnation of the government — much of it online — and raised doubts about the expensive rail project.
But in a bid to exert more control over microblogs, some cities such as Shanghai and Beijing now require weibo users to register under their real names, making it easier for authorities to track them.
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.
Source AP