Amy Qin has an excellent piece at ChinaFile explaining why we shouldn’t think Weibo will be affecting real social change anytime soon. Qin lays out statistics on current internet usage in China:
In the absence of detailed information about the demographics of Weibo’s user base, looking at the makeup of China’s netizen population as a whole serves as a useful reminder of just how skewed the Chinese netizenry still remains. According to the 29th Statistical Report on International Development in China [PDF], released by the China Internet Network Information Center earlier this year, at the end of 2011, the overall Internet penetration rate in China still hovers around 40 percent, or 513 million netizens in a population of 1.3 billion. The netizen base is dominated by city-dwellers, with rural users making up only 26.5 percent of the total Internet population. A mere 7 percent of the population of people age fifty and above and 25 percent of people in their forties are online, compared to 73 percent of citizens in their twenties and 70 percent in their teens. As far as education goes, 96 percent of the population of college-educated citizens are online, whereas fewer than 10 percent of those who have received only primary school education or not even that have access to the Internet. The netizenry is also heavily skewed toward the eastern, more economically developed provinces. In Beijing, the Internet penetration rate is 70 percent, whereas in Yunnan, Jiangxi, and Guizhou it is less than 25 percent. And of this 513 million strong population of netizens, only about half, or 48.7 percent, use the Internet to access microblogs.
Everyone already knew China’s Internet population was overwhelmingly young, urban, and educated, but these numbers are still striking for two reasons. First, statistical trends in the country suggest that China is only becoming more urban and more educated. And while the country is becoming older in the aggregate, as time passes a larger percentage of the population will have experience using the Internet. It’s safe to assume, therefore, that Weibo will increasingly be the vanguard of grassroots public opinion in China in the coming years.
Second, the micro-blog penetration rate of 48.7 percent is really high. By contrast, only 15 percent of American Internet users now use Twitter. That’s a significant difference. Far more Americans use Facebook, but Twitter is much more analogous to Chinese micro-blogs.
It’s interesting to think about where the political center of gravity lies in China. Right now, it may be a recent internal migrant from Sichuan or Henan working at a Foxconn plant. In ten years, it may be a young- and still struggling- urban resident with a college degree and a Weibo account. That has to be a nagging thought in the back of Xi Jinping’s mind.
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