Guo Liang, leading researcher of the Chinese internet at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has released another report on the usage of the internet in seven cities in China with interesting, although seldom surprising conclusions. (The whole report in pdf-format is here.)
I went through the highlights first and here are my picks:
An overwhelming majority (more than 80 percent) wants control on the internet by the government. Most concerned are the interviewees about porn, violence and spam, but 41 percent also wants political control (up from 8 percent in 2005). Support for the control of chatting increased from 8 percent in 2005 to 28 percent in 2007.
Because of the availability of cheap broadband, most people surf from their homes (80 percent) and the classic image of male students hitting the internet from smoky internet cafe's has decreased (32 percent).
Chinese internet users mainly focus on the entertainment on the internet, also when they are looking for news, and not so much for other news; that is in line with earlier findings. The usage of search engines has gone up, suggesting a better usage of the internet, from 43 percent in 2005 to 79 percent in 2007.
Internet users spend obvious less time on watching TV or reading print publications, but surprisingly the time they spend on face-to-face contacts has remained the same.
6 comments:
wrong link
Apologies. Changing it now, should be
http://www.markle.org/downloadable_assets/china_internet_survey_11.2007.pdf
I cannot hypothesize an explanation why almost half of the population in a society would like to see controls on politics on the internet. Is it the perception of the the dangers of social instability?
After I published this entry we had in my office in Shanghai an interesting discussion about Guo Liang's research.
My Chinese colleagues disagreed very much with this result and said Guo was looking for a better job.
I do not go along with that conclusion. I do think that many internet users are really not happy with what is going on, millions of new users, who for the first time in their live can tell the world whatever they want are a heavy burden. There is no way for the Chinese internet at this stage to build any consensus on anything. No wonder a growing majority calls for more order.
In China it is still common to turn to the government, when you what more order, so combining those two, I'm not surprised.
The Chinese internet is having growing pains and to be honest, I hope they continue for a while, since there are still so many people not online.
Fons...thanks for this....havent had a chance to look myself, but is there a Chinese version of the report handy?
Links for the Chinese reports should be available here:
http://www.wipchina.org/
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