China Reaches 500 Million Internet Users

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - China added 27.7 million Internet users, putting their grand at 485 million users nationwide in the first six months of 2011. While a staggering sum, that figure is only a minority of the country's 1.3 billion person population. User growth in China is slowing after large gains in previous years.Internet user growth in China has slowed dramatically over time.

For the January-June six-month period, growth was 6.1 percent, far less than the 9.4 percent growth last year. The figure was even far less than the Chinese Internet population increase of 20.5 percent in 2008, the same year China's total Internet population overtook the United States'.In short, these figures mean that 815 million people in China remain unconnected to the Internet. According to the China Internet Network Information Center, Internet usage is at 36.2 percent in China, compared to 78.2 percent in the U.S. or 90.2 percent in Greenland.

Brazil has similar Internet penetration, which helps explains the significance of these new statistics. While both Brazil and China have booming middle classes thanks to strong economic growth, two thirds of their populations remain disconnected from the Internet age. In both China and Brazil, there are large concentrations of rural, poor, elderly and otherwise marginalized people not participating in the online economy, unable to access the wealth of information available digitally.