By Herman Lai, posted Jan 17, 2012 at 5:22 PM, 379 views,

Over 500 Million Chinese Internet Users Are Living Behind The Great Firewall

According to the statistics by CNNIC, the country had 513 million Internet users at the end of December. This tremendous figure can be attributed to the raise of Weibo and mobile internet becomes common.

Users of Weibo had already exceed 300 million. However, it created lots of hassles for the government to censor its internet due to the speed and scope that Weibo provided. We can take the deadly high-speed rail collision in Wenzhou as an example.The surge in internet users was also spurred by an increasing demand for e-commerce services. Some 173 million Chinese shoppers spent nearly 3 trillion yuan online in the first half of last year.

In 2010, CNNIC released a report indicated the internet population in China was 420 million. The Chinese internet is growing, even more massive now, but desperately, it is still an intranet and it is still slow. We can safely assume the majority of them unaware of the presence of the Great Firewall, and doesn’t understand how the Great Firewall could slow down their internet. Well, only few groups of them know how to make use of VPN to bypass the firewall.

Source: The Economic Times