China's mobile internet at a glance

OMG! You've forgotten your wallet at home. Keep calm and tap to pay on your smartphone.

A recent survey by market watcher Nielsen has found that 99 percent of the country's online shoppers now use mobile payment apps. Living in an increasingly cashless society is now the new norm.

Let's have a glance at the reasons behind the trend.

As of June, the number of people surfing the internet via smartphones reached 656 million in China, rising 36.56 million compared with the number counted half year ago, and also making up about 92.5 percent of all internet users.

Instant messaging, news reading, mobile search, online music and videos, as well as online payments, were among the most popular mobile applications.

Using mobile shopping as an example, according to the latest data from iReseach, China's mobile shopping Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) amounted to 783.44 billion yuan in the second quarter of 2016, rising 75.9 percent compared with the same period of last year, implying that the market maintained high growth.

Another example explains the growth in the usage of mobile internet comes from the catering industry. Users of food take-out APPs rose more than 40 percent in the first six months of 2016, with 146 million Chinese using their phone to order food.

China is also leading the rest of the world in mobile payments.

Chinese technology arguably leads the field in payment systems, notably with Alipay and Tencent's Quick Pay, whose QR code-based model has proved to be very popular with consumers.

IResearch's study shows that the country's third-party mobile payment transaction scale reached 9.4 trillion yuan in the second quarter of this year, up 274.9 percent year-on-year. It expects the market size to continually rise further over the next few years.