China has officially exceeded one billion Internet users

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Thus Jacques Dutronc could revisit in 2021 his hit

, released more than half a century ago - in 1966 - when Mao reigned over China.

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It is therefore official, the Middle Empire has more than 1 billion people connected to the internet: 1.011 billion precisely, according to the June score of the Chinese Internet Information Center (CNNIC for the English acronym) reported public Friday. This public body, one of whose missions is to administer the Chinese domain name ".cn" (equivalent to French ".fr"), states that between December and June, 21.75 million inhabitants joined the cohort of web users.

According to the CNNIC, 71.6% of the population now has access to the internet, a proportion that drops to 59.2% in rural areas of the country.

These statistics summarize the great digital leap made by the world's second-largest economy in two decades.

By way of comparison, in France, 70% of those over 15 said they used the internet almost daily, according to a survey published at the end of 2020.

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Even if the criteria of the French and Chinese surveys differ, it seems that in the country of the Great Wall which pushes back Google, Facebook and other YouTube, where the smartphone has replaced the wallet of hundreds of millions of city dwellers, the penetration rate Internet has caught up with that of France.