Photo credit: kk9k.
Last week, CNNIC released its latest user count for the Chinese internet. As usual, the numbers are staggering: 731 million internet users, 695 million of whom are also users of the mobile web. It’s quite difficult to wrap your head around just how big the Chinese internet really is.
But for those interested in where China’s tech industry is headed, the bigger story might be the hidden number. China’s population is about 1.35 billion, so if 731 million Chinese are using the internet, that means there are still 619 million people in China who aren’t online.
Who are these people? Your first guess might be that they’re mostly elderly – China does have an aging population problem, after all. But those numbers don’t really add up. About 26.6 percent of China’s population is over age 60. Even if you assume that not a single person over 60 in China has ever touched a web browser (and that’s certainly not the case), that still leaves 260 million younger folks who aren’t on the web.
It’s an education problem.
The real answer: China’s non-internet-using population correlates strongly with its rural population. Around 620 million Chinese people still live in rural areas, and according to a recent CNNIC report, only 191 million of them are online.
CNNIC says that demand for the internet is weak in rural China, and that’s clearly true. China has almost total broadband coverage between wired networks and its near-ubiquitous 4G coverage. And affordability doesn’t seem to be a big problem. Most rural residents who aren’t online – almost 70 percent of them – say it’s because they lack computer and/or internet knowledge. In other words, it’s an education problem.
That’s a problem that China’s government and its internet companies have been trying to fix for years now. Ecommerce players like Alibaba and JD, in particular, have been eager to get China’s rural areas online and bring them into the ecommerce fold. But despite some interesting education and outreach programs, progress has been slow.
Last week, my colleague Steven used this chart to demonstrate how far China has come, but in a way it also demonstrates how far the country still has to go. To reach the level of a developed nation like the US (with 88 percent of its population online), if China’s internet continues growing at its current rate of 43 million new internet users per year, it will take another decade – until the end of 2026 – for China to get 88 percent of its population online.
731 million internet users is massive. When it comes to total population connected, no other country even comes close to China. But if you want to know how China’s internet market is liable to change over the next decade, the important number probably isn’t the 731 million people who are online, it’s the 619 million people who aren’t. There’s a whole other potential Chinese internet market out there that’s completely untapped. The challenge for both China’s government and its internet companies over the next decade may well be figuring out how give those people the education and access they need to bring them into the fold.
This is an opinion piece.
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