China sobrepasa a Estados Unidos en usuarios de Internet

Finalmente, China superó a Estados Unidos en número absoluto de usuarios de Internet (253 millones contra 220 millones). En términos relativos, la distancia continúa siendo muy grande a favor de Estados Unidos (70% contra 19%) (y así será sin duda por mucho tiempo). La cifra proviene de una encuesta telefónica de un organismo dependiente de la academia nacional de ciencias de China, que a la vez informa de un crecimiento de 90 millones de usuarios en un año.
De la encuesta, un aspecto de las cifras es particularmente interesante: la participación de las nuevas generaciones:

The survey found that nearly 70 percent of China’s Internet users were 30 or younger, and that in the first half of this year, high school students were, by far, the fastest-growing segment of new users, accounting for 39 million of the 43 million new users in that period

Esto implica gran actividad en la red; comercio y redes sociales:

“The Internet market is the fastest-growing consumer market sector in China,” said Richard Ji, an Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. “We are still far from saturation. So the next three to five years, we’re still going to see hyper-growth in this market.”

Baidu, for instance, said on Thursday that its second-quarter net profit had jumped 81 percent. During that period, Baidu had a 63 percent share of China’s search engine market, while Google had about 26 percent, with Yahoo trailing far behind, according to iResearch, a market research firm based in Beijing.

Tencent, a popular site for social networking and gaming, now has a stock market value of $15 billion, making it one of the world’s most valuable Internet companies. In comparison, Amazon.com is valued at about $30 billion.

(...) One measure of the growth of the Internet here, and its social and entertainment functions, is the popularity of blogs.

The site of China’s most popular blogger, the actress Xu Jinglei, has attracted more than 174 million visitors over the last few years, according to Sina.com, the popular Web portal, which posts a live tally. According to Sina, 11 other bloggers have also attracted more than 100 million visitors in recent years.

Para un país con tradición de rígidos controles sociales, Internet presenta un desafío probablemente insoluble.