Lu Li, a 23-year-old working with a foreign firm in East China's Shanghai, has found surfing online indispensable in her daily life since she first accessed to internet seven years ago.

"It has unfolded a new chapter in my life," she says, adding that she can hardly imagine living without internet.

Lu is one of the new generation emerging in the country in the past ten years, who are learning, entertaining and shopping all electronically. A report released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in July indicates that China has 103 million netizens, or internet users, like Lu Li.

That means one out of 13 Chinese uses internet. Ten years ago, there were barely 50,000 internet accounts throughout China. A survey on some 2,400 people in five Chinese cities show that an average netizen spends 2.73 hours online daily, reading news, sending or receiving emails, playing games, downloading music, gathering background materials or chatting.

Driving force

Mao Wei, director of CNNIC, hails the country's internet population of 103 million as "a milestone figure," which represents a 100-time increase in 7 years.

In connection, 45.6 million computers across China have been linked to internet, a 25.6% climb over the previous year.

What's more significant, Mao says, is that broadband users account for half of the figure, standing at 53 million.

"Broadband has made things more convenient to the netizens, with more services available to them," says Wang En'hai, an official with CNNIC.

A major driving force of the rapid development of internet in China in the past decade is the government's promotion. Since its formal integration into the global networks on April 20, 1994, there were"information highway" projects in the late 1990s to bring government departments at various levels to "go online," which made even remote governments on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau accessible to internet.

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