At the end of June this year the number of Chinese Internet users totaled 123 million, of whom 77 million people were broadband subscribers, said Jiang Yaoping, deputy minister of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) during China's 2006 Internet Conference, which opened on September 21. He also revealed that China has 788 thousand websites and 54.5 million computers connected to the Internet.

The Internet is now used widely in China and it is becoming individualized and more interactive as new services such as blogging, information classification and P2P gain popularity, said Wu Qiheng, chairman of the Internet Society of China and academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

However, as Han Xia, deputy director of the Telecommunications Administration Bureau under MII pointed out, the distribution of Internet expansion and development is not equal. Coastal cities in East China have a strong base and a high-quality broadband Internet connection. The Internet has reached more people in these cities than in other areas. They will have a mature broadband industry in two or three years. In West China just a handful of cities, such as Chengdu and Chongqing, have broadband Internet access. Here the market is only just beginning to grow and only a small proportion of people have access to the Internet.

By People's Daily Online