China Internet Population Hits 384 Million
China Internet population hits 384 million
Fri Jan 15, 2010 4:11am ESTBEIJING, Jan 15 (Reuters) – China’s population of Internet users jumped by nearly a third to 384 million at the end of last year, an official report showed on Friday, days after Google threatened to retreat from the expanding market.
The report from the state China Internet Network Information Center (www.cnnic.net.cn) underscored the growing scope of the Internet in the country, which Google said it may quit because of censorship and hacking. [ID:nSGE60C01H]
Throughout 2009, the number of Chinese Internet users grew by 86 million — more than the total population of Germany — or a rise of 28.9 percent compared to the end of 2008.
The survey, based on a count of residents who said they used the Internet in the past six months, found 29 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people are now net users.
The numbers establish China’s position as the world’s largest online community, more than the entire population of the United States.
“Although the rate of (Internet) participation continues to rise, compared to developed countries, China’s rate of Internet participation remains quite low,” said the report.
By contrast, 74 percent of Americans use the Internet and 77 percent of South Koreans, it said.
China’s rate of growth in Internet users slowed compared with 2008, when the number grew by 41.9 percent. In 2002, China had 59 million users.
With China’s expanding 3G mobile network, more than 120 million people used mobile Internet applications, said the Chinese-language report.
The number of people using the Internet to book travel, bank and carry out other commerce grew by 68 percent year-on-year. (Reporting by Chris Buckley; Editing by Ken Wills and Sugita Katyal)
Bold and underline added by me for emphasis.
Islam in China
Here are a few quick highlights about Islam in China taken from “A report on the size and distribution of the World’s Muslim Population. I copied and pasted the interesting parts about China below:
- Estimated 2009 Muslim Population: 21,667,000 (Afghanistan has 28,072,000)
- Percentage of Population that is Muslim: 1.6%
- Percentage of World Muslim Population: 1.4%
- “China has more Muslims than Syria”
- “Of the 232 countries and territories included in this study, 50 are Muslim-majority. Out of these, however, more than six-in-ten (62%) have a smaller Muslim population than do Russia and China individually.”
- “There are Muslims in every province of China, but the highest concentrations are in the west, primarily in Xinjiang, Ningxia and Gansu, with other significant populations in Henan, Qinghai,Yunnan, Hebei and Shandong. Xinjiang is the only Muslim-majority province of China, with Muslims accounting for approximately 53% of the total population.”
“Mapping the Global Muslim Population” by Pew Research Center. October 2009. See Pages 1,7,8,&13. - Download the full report
12.2.09
China sentences megachurch leaders to prison
Here are some good insights from Pastor Gardner as well as an article about persecution in China!
The following article reminds you to pray for people who are presenting the gospel in “creative access” countries.
It also might remind you that we need to be careful to train leaders. Though I love the idea of a large church this church might have reached more people, spread out more, and caused less disturbance to the community if they had been dozens of smaller churches reaching a community.
I hope that you pray about being a leader trainer. It is not about how many you can get to come and hear you preach but by how many you can train to do the job.
Jesus could have had the largest church ever but the way He changed the world was by training 11 men to shake the entire world after He had gone back to Heaven.
These charges are trumped up charges, no doubt! But megachurches cause problems in the community that the people have a problem with, noise, traffic, etc.
At least you could think of planting churches and training leaders!
Article by Michelle A Vu, Christian Post
A Chinese court sentenced the pastor and leaders of a 50,000-member megachurch in northeastern China to prison, rights groups reported Thursday.
“This case clearly shows the serious deteriorating situation of religious persecution in China,” Fu said. “We call upon the Obama administration and international community to speak up unequivocally in its concern about this case.”
Pastor Wang Xiaoguang of Linfen Fushan Church in Linfen, northern Shanxi province received three years for “illegal land occupation” and his wife Yang Rongli received a maximum of seven years for “illegal land occupation” and “assembling a crowd to disrupt public order”, according to ChinaAid Association. Other church leaders received three- to four-and-a-half-year prison sentences.
The sentences are some of the toughest for house church leaders in recent years.
“To punish an innocent house church leader with seven years imprisonment is the most serious sentence since 2004 when the senior Henan house church leader Pastor Zhang Rongliang received a similar length,” said CAA President Bob Fu in a statement. “We strongly condemn these unjust sentences, which are based on trumped-up changes.”
The trial was held at the People’s Court of Raodu district, Linfen City on Wednesday and lasted over 12 hours. Only one family member for each of the accused church leaders was allowed to attend the court hearing. In total, only four family members were at the trial for the five church leaders.
Moreover, the defense lawyers were only allowed to review 50 pages of the “evidence materials” related to the case before the trial. But during the trial, government prosecutors presented more than 1,000 pages of so-called evidence.
The five were convicted of “illegal land occupation” and “assembling a crowd to disrupt public order”.
The trial came after a massive raid by police and hired security guards on Fushan Church in September. During the pre-dawn raid on September 13, reportedly 400 people in police suits raided and destroyed buildings on the Good News Cloth Shoes Factory property, where the Fushan Church is located.
The raid was one of the worst crackdowns against a house church in the past decade, according to CAA.
Men tore at the building’s foundation with shovels as bulldozers worked to level other buildings on the site. Church members sleeping at the construction site of the new church building were reportedly attacked with bricks and other objects, according to CAA. Several members were seriously injured and were sent to the emergency room, and some members were unconscious.
Following the raid, Yang and other church officials attempted to travel to Beijing to protest the destruction of their church to the central government authorities. However, they were arrested and detained during their trip.
During Wednesday’s trial, Yang and Pastor Wang encouraged their son to stand firm in his faith in Christ, according to CAA. The husband and wife team had led the Fushan Church for more than 30 years.
No, we don’t call on the Obama administration and international community to speak up, we call upon the God of Heaven to to give these Chinese Christians boldness in spite of the persecution!
07.4.09
Current Facts & Stats About “Age” in China
Here are a few current facts, stats and news items about China taken from a survey of the ageing population in China.
“Old people’s homes are a rarity in China, catering for only about 1% of the over-65s, far less than in most Western countries. The vast majority of older Chinese live with their families. Care for the old within the family is not only a cultural expectation, based on the Confucian tradition of respect for age and experience; under a law passed in 1996 it is also a legal obligation. Elderly people have been known to sue their families for maintenance if they fail to comply.”
“For the past three decades China has been operating a strict population-control policy, so there are now far fewer young people around to take care of the elderly. This state of affairs is usually referred to by the nifty formula “4-2-1”, meaning that the typical only child today will have two parents and four grandparents to look after—a bit of an exaggeration, but not that far off.”
“China is still a relatively young country, with a median age of around 30. But, uniquely among developing countries, it is ageing extraordinarily fast, so by 2050 its median age will have risen to about 45. Over the next few decades the ratio of elderly dependants to people of working age will rise steeply, from 10% now to 40% by 2050. From about 2030 the country will have more elderly dependants than children…”
“Average life expectancy at birth, at 74, is now 25 years higher than it was 50 years ago, yet the retirement age has remained at the same low level. Unless it goes up, any comprehensive pension system that China might eventually introduce will be hideously expensive.”
“There is no explicit population target, but the latest forecasts suggest that numbers will keep growing from about 1.3 billion now to a peak of around 1.46 billion by 2030 and then start declining gently.”
Read the full article: A Special Report on Ageing Populations: China’s Predicament
04.29.09
1,319,175,336 Souls in China
Just a Reminder!
The Latest in China News: Health, Culture, & Society.
Child disease outbreak kills 33 in rural China (April 7, 2009, Reuters)
Thirty-three children in two crowded rural provinces of China have died in an outbreak of hand, foot and mouth disease that could claim more victims as it spreads in summer heat, state media reported on Tuesday. The disease, a common childhood illness, is rarely fatal but can cause fever, mouth sores and blisters. Severe forms of the virus can be deadly if not properly treated. Eighteen children have died from the disease in central Henan province and at least 15 in eastern Shandong province this year, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Henan, a rural province crowded with poor farmers, is the center of China’s latest outbreak of the disease, which killed 40 children nationwide last year, spreading alarm among parents who accused officials of indifference and cover-ups.
China to issue new list of simplified Chinese characters (April 9, 2009, Xinhua)
For the first time in nearly 20 years, China will issue a modified list of simplified Chinese characters in an effort to further standardize a language used by billions around the world. Wang Ning, vice director with the Institute of Linguistics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), said Wednesday at a CASS conference on Chinese culture that editing of the new list had already been completed and changes would be published “very soon”. She did not give an exact date or tell Xinhua how the list would be made available. The Chinese mainland first introduced simplified characters in 1956. But Taiwan and the then foreign-controlled southern regions of Hong Kong and Macao retained the ancient traditional characters. Simplified characters were created by decreasing the number of strokes to write. In 1986, the State Language Commission issued a list of 2,235 simplified Chinese characters as a way to standardize the written form of the language.
Military reveals Olympic security data (April 8, 2009, Xinhua)
The Chinese army had deployed more than 46,000 servicemen for security and safety operations in Beijing, Qingdao and Hong Kong during last year’s Beijing Olympics, a top Chinese military official revealed Tuesday in a published article. Also 44 sets of air-defense missiles, 63 ships, 98 aircrafts and 60 helicopters were pressed into service, the PLA revealed for the first time since the Games. A total of 14,000 troops also performed most of the programs in the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics.
These news stories are taken from the latest edition of ZGBreifs which is a condensation of news items gathered from published sources. Click Here To Subscribe or Click Here to download the latest issue.
The Never Ending Song
Here is a fun story from inside China:
“The never ending song (March 12, 2009, Xinhua)
More than 1,200 residents in northeastern China have set a new world karaoke record by singing continuously for 456 hours, two minutes and five seconds. Students, soldiers, and businessmen from Changchun, capital of Jilin Province, sang more than 6,200 songs from February 20 until yesterday morning, Xinhua News Agency reported today. It beat the old Guinness World Record, set by Finns in July, by nearly 10 hours.”
China Needs Some Missional Bloggers
Here is a great article on how we can reach China using the internet…Will you heed the call?
Wow. Un-beeeee-leeeve-able.
I just read some statistics on how blogging is experiencing a meteoricgrowth pattern in terms of blogging.
Check these facts out:
According to a set of statistics I consulted, the number of bloggers in China exceeded 100 million in 2007.
Phenomenally-popular finance blogger Xu Xiaoming was the “hit king” of Chinese blogs in 2008 with 355 million hits.
Other statistics predict that between 2012 and 2015, China will see blogs with hit counts of 1 billion.
Those numbers are simply staggering. Can you imagine a single-author blog gathering 355 million hits? Unbelievable. Consider that Japan has only 10 million bloggers.
But it’s happening, and it’s growing, and it’s not stopping. With such a large portion of the community and nation hooked up into the interwebs we need some bloggers who are calledto blog and reach into that space.
We need Missional Bloggers in China.
Check out this info:
Blogs actually have a history in China of only five years, more or less, so this pace of growth is astonishing.
Two other points are surprising in addition to speed. First, diversity of blogger identity: both experts and non-experts are active in this medium of social exchange. Second,openness of blogger identity: celebrities as well as ordinary people are open about their identities and blog under their real names.
Wow. What an opportunity.
I can’t do it. I don’t know much of anything about the Chinese culture and I certainly do not speak the language. But I feel that a new type of ministry opportunities are arriving in light of the technological breakthroughs that are occuring around the globe.
Will you heed the call?
02.21.09
Audio Slideshow: Christianity Sweeping China
“After decades in the shadows, Christianity is sweeping China, overflowing churches and posing a sensitive challenge to the officially atheist Communist Party. Chicago Tribune correspondent Evan Osnos and photographer José M. Osorio tell the story of this struggle for religious freedom.”
CLICK HERE to watch the Audio Slideshow: Christianity Sweeping China
01.29.09
Beijing’s population exceeds 17 million
“Then saith he unto his disciples, The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few; Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth labourers into his harvest.” (Matthew 9:37-38)
Beijing is bulging as its population has exceeded 17 million, only 1 million to go to reach the ceiling the city government has set for 2020. The figure breaks down into 12.04 million holders of Beijing “hukou”, or household registration certificates, and 5.1 million floating population, sources with the Ministry of Public Security said at Monday’s workshop on the country’s management of migrants. Beijing municipal government announced last year it would limit its population to 18 million by 2020. Overpopulation is putting considerable pressure on the city’s natural resources and environment. And experts have warned the current population, 17 million calculated at the end of June, is already 3 million more than Beijing’s resources can feed.