Despite the market shakeups in the pre and post pandemic ridden world, China rises as the global leader in the rapid development of the ‘Online World’—breaking the new ground of a resilient digital ecosystem.
For many others, Covid-19 is a nightmare that shredded trillions of dollars from world economies and jeopardised people’s quality of life across the planet. In China however, it got conceived as a litmus test and stunningly, China passed the test by growing beyond the traditional practices that are usually exercised in the internet landscape. This has a positive influence on people’s daily lives, everyday economic activity and the country’s economic development as well as social progress.
Raising the bar for many economic giants, China has not only achieved a stunning rate of 2.3 percent in national growth but has also taken the world by storm through its sustainable traction on digital connectivity and online revolution.
First, the industrial revolution came with the steam engine which mechanised world economies. Then, the power of electricity was created and nurtured. The development of computer technology catalysed the third revolution. The Internet, believed to be the impetus of the fourth revolution, is doubling down its footprints in China, ushering in an era of e-revolution with high density despite Covid-19 headwinds.
According to the 47th China Statistical Report on Internet Development published on February 3, China shows an exceptionally strong momentum in internet related fields during the Coronavirus outbreak. By the end of 2020, the Netizens population has been touching nearly 1 billion in China and almost all of them surf the net through mobile phones. Most remarkably, digital diversity deepens with a 10 percent surge of senior internet users, mostly over the age 50, from March to December 2020.
Although China’s investment in internet infrastructure along with the increase of the people’s income levels, the involvement of internet services in the combats against Covid-19 attributes much of the growth.
Nearly 900 million from the Chinese population applied for the Epidemic Prevention Health Code from a nationwide platform for entering into public service areas such as buses, trains, flights, supermarkets, libraries, schools and hospitals. The useful mechanism has been used more than 40 billion times all over the country—five times the global population.
China’s internet enterprises surged 51 percent more towards the end of 2019. The total market value of listed Chinese internet companies in the world reached 16.8 trillion yuan at the end of 2020. Remarkable progress was also achieved in quantum technology, block chain and AI in the past year. 98 percent of the poorest villages got access to optic fibre networks by the end of 2020.
Covid-19’s onslaught let China to unlock its innate capabilities to fight back against all adversaries. The challenge helped China win the war of nerves against the virus, develop a new digitally diversified society and emerge as a handy tool to mitigate poverty.
China is emerging as a diversified digital society with the internet further penetrating the underaged and old-age groups, the report says. It is becoming increasingly evident that the underaged and elderly are beginning to use the internet more. As of December 2020, citizens aged 60 and above accounted for 11.2 percent of the country’s total internet users, moving up 7.3 percentage points from December 2015. On the other hand, students only made up 21 percent of the total. The report also shows that China, the world’s largest online retail market for the eighth consecutive year, saw its annual online retail sales total 11.76 trillion yuan (about 1.82 trillion U.S. dollars) in 2020, a 10.9 percent increase. This is no surprise as about 86.4 percent of the country’s total internet users use online payment.
In addition, the number of online short video users reached 873 million by the end of last year, accounting for 88 percent of the internet-using population, according to the report.
Mobile phones are evolving into new farm tools as online sales increase and e-commerce has become a part of farm work for China’s rural population.
By the end of 2020, e-commerce had covered the country’s 832 national-level poverty-stricken counties, reads the report. Data from the report shows that online retail sales in rural areas jumped to 1.79 trillion yuan last year, from 180 billion yuan in 2014.
New forms of rural online shopping, including livestreaming and e-commerce, not only benefit consumers, but also boost the sale of high-quality agricultural products in rural areas.
The government’s efforts to expand rural internet coverage over recent years have been successful as about 98 percent of residents in China’s poor villages had access to the internet through fibre-optic cables by the end of 2020—a 70 percent increase in 5 years. As of December 2020, around 31.3 percent of China’s online population live in rural areas, where the internet penetration rate stood at 56 percent.