ABSTRACT
After a modest beginning in the mid-1990s, China now boasts the world’s second largest population of internet users, 1 which stood at 137 million people by December 2006, a big jump from 620,000 users in 1997 (CNNIC, 1997; CNNIC, 2007). The internet penetration in China, however, is basically an urban phenomenon that excludes the majority living in rural and remote regions (Wacker, 2000). The number of rural internet users is about 0.5 million, accounting for approximately 0.4 per cent of China’s total internet users (CNNIC, 2007). Poor communication infrastructure and low levels of knowledge and incomes have put rural people at a disadvantage, resulting in a huge digital divide between the urban and the rural, the more developed coastal areas in the east and vast rural areas in the west.
