China Claims World's Largest Internet User Base

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, more than 253 million people in China are now online. By contrast, Nielsen Online reports more than 220 million Americans have Internet access at home and/or work, and 73 percent of those were active in May.

"This is the first time the number has drastically surpassed the United States, becoming the world's number one," the nation's official net monitoring body said in a statement quoted by BBC News. However, western researchers say some caution is advisable when it comes to weighing statistics about Internet use in China.

"Estimates of the size of the Chinese Internet population vary a great deal, depending on the definition of 'Internet user,' among other things," noted the authors of a report issued by Pew Research and the American Life Project earlier this year. The estimates are more "interesting for their trend, rather than for their absolute numbers," Pew Research analysts said.

Inevitable Eclipse

For comparison, comScore reports Internet use in China rose 14 percent in April to 102 million visitors. Moreover, the research firm currently ranks the Chinese-language search engine Baidu as No. 3 in the worldwide search market, behind Google and Yahoo.

Despite the uncertainties involved in making statistical comparisons between Chinese and western data, researchers agree that China's eclipse of U.S. Internet usage is inevitable. Though the U.S. still accounts for 21 percent of Internet users worldwide, growth in the number of users has been slowing, comScore reports. Only 19.1 percent of China's 1.3 billion residents have online access, whereas 71 percent of Americans are connected to the Internet.

Among other things, the overall growth trend for China is a harbinger of the growing online shopping and advertising dollars that will be at stake moving forward. More than 85 percent of the world's online population has used the...