China’s internet report shows who the winners and losers are during the pandemic

Eight key takeaways from China’s biannual internet roundup, including education and live streaming services getting a big boost while travel and food delivery apps suffer

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Students living in remote areas in rural China are having a hard time as the coronavirus outbreak forces schools to move their classes online. (Picture: Xinhua)

Xinmei Shen

Published: 10:12pm, 29 Apr 2020Updated: 10:12pm, 29 Apr 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we all live and work. And now we can see the impact of those changes in China, thanks to a comprehensive new report detailing how the pandemic has pushed millions of people online -- and the industries suffering as people stop using their services in quarantine.

Twice a year, the state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) releases a report about the country’s internet population and the development of different sectors. We dug through all 135 pages so you don’t have to, and here’s our eight key takeaways.

China has over 900 million internet users…

China now has 904 million people online. The country’s online population added 75 million people since the end of 2018. And 897 million of these internet users, or 99.3%, get online using mobile devices. To put it another way, that’s more than the entire population of Europe all accessing the internet on their phones in China.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that China has the largest internet population in the world. It’s followed by India and the United States, which have 560 million and 313 million internet users respectively, according to Internet World Stats.

…But nearly 500 million people are still offline

While China’s internet population is comparatively massive, the country has 1.4 billion people. That leaves 496 million people without internet access as of March 2020. About 60% of those people live in rural areas. Again, that means as large as China’s internet population is -- the number of people offline in China is more than the entire population of the United States.