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As per new statistics released by the Chinese Government, China is close to beating the United States as the country with the maximum Internet users in the coming months.

According to a report released by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC), the number of Internet users in China has reached 210 million at the end of 2007. This represents a 53 percent growth compared to 2006, when China had registered only 137 million Internet users.

CNNIC said that during 2007 China saw an increase of 25 million Internet users in the first half of the year, while 48 million new Internet went online during the second half of 2007.

The greatest growth came from users under 18 and over 30, CNNIC said. One of the most surprising statistics from the new report indicates that about 40 percent of users added over the last year, over 29 million, came from rural areas. Even in the January 2007 report, the vast majority of Chinese Netizens were based in major urban areas such as Beijing and Shanghai.

The report also provided a break down of various Internet applications in terms of popularity. The most frequent usage of Internet has shifted to entertainment: the top seven Internet applications used most were: music (86.6 percent), instant messages (81.4 percent), videos (76.9 percent), news (73.6 percent) and search engines (72.4 percent).

In addition, there are 120 million online gamers (59.3 percent), while 118 million (56.5 percent) users have ranked e-mail as their favorite application.

According to statistics in the report, 181 million users go online for music, 170 million for instant messages. Nearly 40 percent of users chose instant messages as the application they used first on the Internet, followed by Internet news, email etc. Amongst the applications listed, email was always the most popular application before 2007.

"The email use rate in China has been on the decline. Instead, many people have opted for IM services, which have become better, and replaced the function of emails to a certain degree," said a center official, Wang Enhai, for China Daily.

Digital entertainment is one of the most important factors fueling the rapid growth in Internet user population.

These figures put China just 5 million users away from becoming the world's largest wired nation, and with only about 16 percent of the population online. At its current growth rate, China will become the world's top Internet market sometime in the next few months.