China’s government might be pretty restrictive when it comes to what their citizens can and cannot see over the Internet, while ensuring not a single person of the general populace is able to own a Facebook account, but that does not mean Internet usage is surpressed. No sir, in fact, it seems that the number of Chinese citizens who are able to access the Internet has already surpassed the half billion mark, which is more than one third of China’s total population. This statistic is furnished by the China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run organization, so it is as close as it can get to the actual figure.
It would be interesting to see how the Internet generation in China will help shape and grow the country, which might eventually become the world’s largest economy as it steps on the accelerator to overtake the US after they sped past Japan last year. According to a translated quotation from the China Media Project in Hong Kong, journalist Hu Yong mentioned the importance of the explosion of Internet use in China by summing it up, “The Internet cannot usher in dramatic change to political life in China, but it can promote the creation of social capital on the basis of citizen rights and duties, giving rise to and strengthening social forces independent of the Chinese state.”