The booming of the Internet has been slowed by the low level of informationization in China. There are four factors that have blocked the rapid development of the Internet in the country:
Low speed. People who surf the web are often irritated by the slow speed; they have to wait for minutes before getting through to a website. What China's Internet lacks most is the bandwidth of the network. The Chinese Ministry of Information Industry has pledged to speed up enlarging the capacity of the bandwidth of various networks by fivefold or more, along with the increase in the number of netizens and growth of E-business.
Insufficient Chinese websites and information. Although Chinese is the most familiar language to most Chinese netizens, online information in Chinese is greatly deficient, which has hindered the spread of the Internet in China.
To relieve the bottleneck situation, China has done a lot to enrich online Chinese information in recent years. Since the Government Online Program was launched last year, the 3,000-odd data banks of governmental departments at various levels, which produce 80 percent of the country's information sources, have been linked to the Internet. However, the number of Chinese websites and quantity of Chinese information are far from being enough to meet the demand.
High charges. If a person surfs the Internet for an hour a day, he or she will have to pay 210 yuan a month. This is a lot of money in a country where the average monthly salary is about 1,000 yuan or lower.
Although China's telecom departments have lowered the surfing fees from 10 yuan per hour to four yuan, and the communications charges from 0.18 yuan for three minutes to 0.09 yuan, the fees are still fairly high compared to the income level.
Insufficient publicity. There are still many Chinese people who are ignorant about what the Internet is, much less E-business. Internet browsers in China are still a small group totaling about 10 million, accounting for less than one percent of the total population. The surfing population is imbalanced. According to a report made by the China Internet Network Information Center in January this year, male netizens account for 79 percent and female netizens only 21 percent of the nation's total population, with most of both sections (88.2 percent) under the age of 35.
