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China has most net users in world

img src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45373000/jpg/_45373583_3g226.jpg" align="left" width="226" height="170" alt="Visitors test 3G wireless network at communications show, Beijing, Oct 08" border="0" vspace="4" hspace="4"p class="first"bChina's online population, already the world's largest, has expanded to 298 million./bpThis marks a 41.9% increase on the previous year and is still growing fast, said the government-linked China Internet Network Information Centre.pThe study also showed huge increases in the number of people in China accessing the internet through mobile phones.pThe report by Cinic also noted that internet use in the countryside was increasing faster than in the cities.pAt the end of 2008, the number of net users in China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, was almost the same as the entire population of the United States.pUsers in the countryside surged by 60.8% year-on-year to 84.6 million, compared with much more modest growth of 35.6% in the urban areas, the report said.pThe Cinic report said 117.6 million people accessed the Internet using their mobile phones last year, up 133% from 2007.pStudents are the main strength of mobile Internet users, the study said: 43.5% of them use their cell phones to read online news, download music, check email and perform a variety of other tasks.pb3G boom/bpChina, with 633.8 million mobile phone users, last week issued long-awaited licences for third-generation (3G) mobile phones to China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.p"With the coming of the 3G era, wireless Internet will have exponential growth," Cininc said in a statement accompanying the release of its report.p3G phones enable faster data transmission and services such as watching TV, playing online games, wide-area wireless calls and web surfing.pBy 2011, the three operators expect to start 3G services all over China, a move which analysts predict will spur further massive growth in mobile internet use.pAs the categories of mobile Internet services increase, charges have also been dropping fast.pChina's Internet penetration is still low at just 22.6% , leaving more room for rapid growth, Cinic said.pbConstraints/bpThe study said 234 million people surfed the Internet to read or watch news by the end of 2008, a much higher estimate than recently made by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.pIn 2007, 155 million Chinese Internet users relied on the Web to read news, accounting for 73.6% of the total Internet population, according to Cinic.pIt also said the number of Chinese bloggers hit 162 million by the end of 2008.pChina's booming internet use comes despite government attempts to control content and to crack down on allegedly pornographic sites.pAccess to websites offering diverse political opinions remains restricted, even as Chinese intellectuals and activists regularly brave the constraints to post new statements.pThe government also actively uses the internet to put across its actions and ideas, with top leaders having fan sites onlinhrpThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk"BBC News website/a. #169; British Broadcasting Corporation/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=2wvU3D.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?i=2wvU3D.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=Jhmb1T.p"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?i=Jhmb1T.p" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=Gr1lDs.P"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?i=Gr1lDs.P" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed/~4/511504412" height="1" width="1"/