engine - 2:54 pm on Jan 15, 2009 (gmt 0)

China's Net Users Up 42pct [news.bbc.co.uk] to 298 Million

China's online population, already the world's largest, has expanded to 298 million. This marks a 41.9% increase on the previous year and is still growing fast, said the government-linked China Internet Network Information Centre. The study also showed huge increases in the number of people in China accessing the internet through mobile phones. The report by Cinic also noted that internet use in the countryside was increasing faster than in the cities. At the end of 2008, the number of net users in China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, was almost the same as the entire population of the United States.