Cyber Behavior of Chinese Internet Users

Overview

Since the Internet was first formally opened to the Chinese general public in 1995, China has undergone an explosive growth in Internet usage and coverage. By the end of 2008, China topped the United States with the largest number of Internet users in the world. We have witnessed an increasing interest in studying Internet usage in China. The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) was founded on June 3rd, 1997. It published the first Chinese Internet Development Condition Report in November, 1997. This report mainly focuses on Chinese Internet users’ demographic information, Internet using condition and behavior. Since then it publishes this report every 6 months. Zhang and Jiang (1998), Zhou and Su (1999) published the earliest papers in China on Internet users’ behavior. However, their discussion was primarily based on foreign Internet users’ behavior. They did not really investigate Chinese Internet users’ behavior. The research in this field was very limited in China in 1990s. Ma (2000) first tried to focus on Chinese adolescence’s online communication behavior and discussed how to correctly understand the characteristics of online communication, how to help protect adolescence from unsafe online conditions and how to correctly guide adolescence to use the Internet. Subsequently, research on behavior of Chinese Internet users, especially college students, gained momentum.