The China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC), revealed Monday that the nation's online community is continuing to expand at a rapid pace, with 8.9 million new users in the first half of the year.

China's Internet population hit 68 million by the end of June, the second highest number in the world, following the United States. The latest official statistics reported the figure was only 8.9 million by the end of 2000 and 620,000 in 1997.

The figures were released Monday by the government-funded CNNIC in its latest report, the most authoritative data on the Chinese Internet industry.

It is the 12th report released by the centre since 1997.

Experts attribute the fast increase in the number of Internet users to the government's efforts to build up infrastructure and restructure the telecoms industry.

According to the report, 25.72 million computers are connected to the Internet in China. There are almost 473,900 websites, including 250,651 websites with the domain suffix of ".cn.''

"Cyberspace has become a force to be reckoned with in China,'' said Qian Hualin, a senior Internet analyst from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Netizens between the ages of 18 and 30 remain the driving force, but this age group's share of the whole community dropped steeply from 91 per cent in 1998 to 56 per cent at the end of June.

This decrease was attributed to the steady growth in numbers of adults aged 35 and older who are using the Internet, according to the report, which is released twice a year, Qian said.

The report also offers some interesting figures about the behaviour of Chinese Internet users.

Chinese people spend 13 hours surfing the Internet every week on average with the period from 8 pm to 11 pm becoming prime time. The major reason for them to surf the web is to obtain information or have fun.

CNNIC reported 28.6 per cent of interviewees used the Internet for leisure, a massive gain from 7 per cent in 1998.

However, only 0.2 per cent of the respondents picked online shopping and e-business as their main activity online.

As China's Internet users use e-mails as major communication channel, they are increasingly finding that most of their e-mails are no longer personal -- an average of 8.3 e-mails out of 16 they receive every week are junk mail.

Most of the junk mail comes from domestic e-mail servers because of their default open relay function, giving people the opportunity to use them as transfer stations to send unsolicited mail, said CNNIC official Wang En'hai.

Letting these e-mails run rampant will jeopardize the sound development of electronic mail and the spread of the Internet, Wang said.

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