78 mln Chinese online by the end of 2003

According to new figures, 78 million Chinese will be using the internet by the end of the year. China is second only to the US in terms of the number of internet users and it hopes to be the world's biggest web market in four years' time. One in nine internet users worldwide is in China. It is an astonishing rate of growth for a country which only began hooking up to the internet in 1994. Officially there are 32% more internet users in China than this time last year.