The People's Republic of China has been on the Internet intermittently since May 1989 and on a permanent basis since 20 April 1994. Since 2008, China has become the country with the largest population on the Internet (and remains so ). 1.09 billion people in China (77.5% of the country's total population) use the internet.
China's first foray into the global cyberspace was an email (not TCP/IP based and thus technically not internet) sent on 20 September 1987 to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, reading, "Across the Great Wall, towards the rest of the world" ().中国E-mail：值而立之年却未老先衰. 科技日报. 19 September 2017. This later became a well-known phrase in China and , was displayed on the desktop login screen for QQ mail.
By law, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governs the country's Internet. China's Internet is heavily censored by the CCP, with numerous foreign websites blocked by the Great Firewall. China has one of the lowest cross-border internet traffic rates in the world. The usage of foreign apps and websites is extremely low, with most Chinese netizens using domestic alternatives. The Cyberspace Administration of China, an institution directly under the CCP Central Committee, is the national internet regulator and censor. China requires a real-name system for Internet services and online platforms.
History
From 1995 to 2004, internet use in China was almost entirely in urban areas. By 2003, less than 0.2% of rural people had used the internet. In 2004, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology began the Connecting Every Village Project which promoted the use of telecommunications and internet in rural China. Beginning in late 2009, the program began building rural telecenters each of which had at least one telephone, computer, and internet connectivity. Approximately 90,000 rural telecenters were built by 2011. By 2011, 89% of administrative villages had internet access.
China replaced the U.S. in its global leadership in terms of installed telecommunication bandwidth in 2011. By 2014, China hosts more than twice as much national bandwidth potential than the U.S., the historical leader in terms of installed telecommunication bandwidth (China: 29% versus US: 13% of the global total).
China began implementing a National Broadband Strategy in 2013. The program aimed to increase the speed, quality, and adoption of broadband and 4G networks. As of 2018, 96% of administrative villages had fiber optic networks and 95% had 4G networks.
Wireless, especially internet access through a mobile phone, has developed rapidly. The affordability of mobile phones and internet data in China has resulted in the number of mobile internet users in China surpassing the number of computer internet users. 500 million were accessing the internet via cell phones in 2013. The number of dial-up users peaked in 2004 and since then has decreased sharply. Generally statistics on the number of mobile internet users in China show a significant slump in the growth rate between 2008 and 2010, with a small peak in the next two years.China Mobile Internet Market , China Internet Network Information Center, iResearch. February 2012.
In 2015, the State Council promoted the Internet Plus initiative, a five-year plan to integrate traditional manufacturing and service industries with big data, cloud computing, and Internet of things technology. The State Council provided support for Internet Plus through policy support in area including cross-border e-commerce and rural e-commerce. Various regulatory bodies promoted Internet Plus within their sectors.
In April 2020, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) proposed that "satellite internet" should be a part of new national infrastructure. By the next month, Shanghai, Beijing, Fuzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Shenzhen had each proposed regional action plans to support the new satellite internet constellation project with a goal to provide domestic China satellite internet to rural areas. Beginning in 2019, US (SpaceX Starlink) and UK (OneWeb, 2020) private companies had begun fielding large internet satellite constellations with global coverage; however China does not intend to license non-Chinese technical solutions for satellite broadband within the jurisdiction of Chinese law.
Structure An important characteristic of the Chinese internet is that online access routes are owned by the Chinese government, and private enterprises and individuals can only rent bandwidth from the state. The first four major national networks, namely CSTNET, ChinaNet, CERNET and CHINAGBN, are the "backbone" of the mainland Chinese internet. Later dominant telecom providers also started to provide internet services. China Telecom, China Unicom, and China Mobile control operate the internet exchange points through which incoming traffic must pass.
In January 2015, China added seven new access points to the world's internet backbone, adding to the three points that connect through Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.
As of 2023, the internet in China is characterized by uneven development, with the adoption rate and availability of the internet varying by region and population groups.
Userbase
English-language media in China often use the word netizen particularly to refer to Chinese internet users.
Size China has the largest number of internet users of any country with 1.1 billion as of August 2024. Consistent with the trends of other large and relatively linguistically isolated countries, Chinese internet users tend to focus their internet use on content that is domestically relevant.
As of 2025, 20% of internet users around the world are Chinese.
Demographics In the early years of China's internet, the userbase primarily consisted of young males of the elite or middle class, with higher educational and working in professional fields, located in the most developed regions and biggest cities. Over time, the demographics of Chinese internet users has developed closer to the demographics of the country as a whole. Mobile internet access has increased the participation of females, younger people, less educated people, and people from rural areas.
According to a survey by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), China had 1.09 billion Internet users by the end of December 2023, a 1.9% increase over the year before and a penetration rate of 77.5%. The proportions of users accessing the Internet via mobile phones, desktop computers, laptop computers, TVs and tablet computers were 99.9%, 33.9%, 30.3%, 22.5% and 26.6%, respectively. 51.2% of internet users were male, while the remaining 48.8% were female.
Throughout the history of the internet in China, the majority of users have been between ages 20 and 50.
Law and regulation By law, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) governs the country's Internet. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), an institution directly under the CCP Central Committee, is the primary body for content and data regulation, and serves to translate CCP ideology and policy into technical specifications. It coordinates data regulation enforcement among relevant ministries, including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the State Administration for Market Regulation. The Ministry of Public Security (MPS) has the primary responsibility for preventing cyberattacks.
The legal framework for China's internet regulations is established by the Cyber Security Law, the Data Security Law, and the Personal Information Protection Law. This framework is further developed through regulations and administrative actions.
Chinese policymakers frame data as a "key" factor of production, comparable to land, labor, capital, and technology, thereby requiring an increased level of state control.
Regulatory priorities In 2009, China amended its Criminal Law to create a low threshold for the prosecution of malicious cybercrimes and illegal data sales.
Generally, China advocates for internet sovereignty and tends to prioritize cybersecurity more than personal data protection. Chinese policymakers became increasingly concerned about the risk of cyberattacks following the 2010s global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden, which demonstrated extensive United States intelligence activities in China. As part of its response, the Communist Party in 2014 formed the Cybersecurity and Information Leading Group.
Since 2014, China expresses its key principles on cyberspace sovereignty and related topics in the National Cybersecurity Strategy and Strategy for International Cooperation in Cyberspace. It also discusses principles for developing a "community of common destiny in cyberspace."
The 2017 Cyber Security Law was also part of China's response to increased risks of foreign surveillance and foreign data collection following the United States surveillance disclosures. Among other provisions, the law has significant data localization requirements. It is a major pillar of the Chinese data regulatory environment.
Before the 2020-2021 Xi Jinping administration reform spree, the regulatory environment for internet companies was relatively lax because the government sought to encourage the development of the big data economy. The regulatory environment for tech companies subsequently became stricter and in 2021, two national data laws and a host of regulatory guidelines were promulgated, broadening the scope of government enforcement and increasing the penalties for personal data violations. After mid-2023, the government decreased its regulatory intervention in e-commerce and issued policies more supportive of the e-commerce sector.
In 2020, the Xiao Zhan/227 incident, a conflict among online fan communities arising from a slash fiction novel posted on the fan fiction website Archive of Our Own, resulted in public attention and scrutiny from policymakers on the issue of hostile online communication. The Cyberspace Administration of China's Qinglang Xingdong ("Sweep-Up Campaign") began in June 2021 and sought to clean up harmful actions in fandoms such as fan wars. CAC initiated a series of policies and campaigns against "resentment and abuse, upvoting/downvoting and trolling, disinformation and name-calling, doxing, and privacy violations of online fandom communities." Major Chinese social media platforms revised their policies accordingly.
The 2021 Data Security Law classifies data into different categories and establishes corresponding levels of protection. It imposes significant data localization requirements, in a response to the extraterritorial reach of the United States CLOUD Act or similar foreign laws. The 2021 Personal Information Protection Law is China's first comprehensive law on personal data rights and is modeled after the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. In summer 2021, MIIT began a six-month long regulatory campaign to address a variety of consumer protection and unfair competition issues, including interoperability concerns, in the consumer internet sector. It held meetings with executives from major Chinese tech companies and instructed them that their companies could no longer block external links to competitors.