China says it now has nearly 1 billion internet users

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• China said the number of internet users in the country rose to 989 million by the end of last year, with more than 80 million going online in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
  
• Only about 30% of those nearly 1 billion users made the equivalent of $774 or more a month, the report said.
  
• Fewer Chinese used online education and health-care services by December compared with earlier in the year, the report said.
  

BEIJING — New data show the extent to which Chinese people went online in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and adopted new habits, such as shopping through video livestreams.


By the end of 2020, China had 989 million internet users, according to figures released Wednesday by government agency China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

That’s up by 85.4 million from March, just after the worst of the coronavirus outbreak in China that forced hundreds of millions of Chinese people to spend more time indoors.

For a sense of the scale of China’s nearly 1 billion-large internet population, its lead over India’s estimated 639 million internet users is 350 million, which is bigger than the entire U.S. population.

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