People’s Daily reports:

China’s information industry authority plans to expand broadband service to more than 95 percent of the nation’s villages in 2008.

Pacific Epoch had the Ministry of Information Industries reporting 92% of China’s villages with broadband infrastructure in 2007.

The hullaballoo over the growth in China’s internet population largely overlooked the rural areas:

Last year, 73 million people were added to the nation’s total netizen population. Of the increment, 29.17 million, or 40 percent,lived in rural areas. This brought the number of rural Internet users to 52.62 million at the end of 2007, up 127.7 percent year-on-year. The rate was much higher than the 38.2 percent for urban areas.

There has been some disagreement as to actually how many people use the internet and if China has surpassed the US to become the the country with the largest internet population. That discussion is academic and ultimately irrelevant. Is it 210 million internet users? Should that be bumped up? Down? No one really know what the number is. The infrastructure for the internet and the tools to access it are expanding too quickly. Quantitative data fails to capture what’s really happening.

But it is really happening, and the basic infrastructure is in place. This doesn’t mean that people are running ADSL lines into their piggeries, just that IP networks run to village. Now vendors such as Lenovo, Dell and Haier are trying to sell the tools.

Informatization isn’t a magic bullet to solve the problems of economic development. But in China, at least, the digital divide is getting a little smaller.

'); //-->

ShareThis