China: the connected superpower

Two statistics entered my radar today and stopped me dead in my tracks, which doesn’t happen often. Both concerned the remarkable growth in the connectivity of the Chinese population. The first comes courtesy of the China Internet Network Information Center and reports that the total number of Internet users in China has risen by 23.4 percent from 111 million in 2005 to 137 million at the end of 2006. That’s still something in the region of just 10 percent of the total population of 1.3 billion. The second, via the China Net Investor was even more gob smacking: the China Mobile telephone company has a staggering 301 million cellphone subscribers. Let’s put that into some perspective, a single telecoms company has more cellphone subscribers than the entire population of the United States (298 million as of July 2006.)