After becoming the No.1 mobile subscriber base in the world, China has now surpassed the US in terms of Internet users, according to the latest figures from the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC).

As per the report, China now has 253 million users surfing the World Wide Web, an amazing 56 per cent growth from previous year. This puts China in the top position in the Web browsing sakes, the US having approximately 223 million Internet users according to Nielsen Online.

The country has seen a steady growth of internet population. There were 123 million internet subscribers in June 2006, 200 million during that time in 2007. However, there is a lot of scope for growth considering that Internet penetration in the country stands at only 19 per cent. In contrast, around 71 per cent of the American population has access to the Internet, with much higher figures for South Korea and some Scandinavian countries.

CINIC said China has the world's largest number of broadband subscribers at 214 million accounting for 80 per cent of the Internet population while the rest used low speed internet services.

China Web 2.0 Review translated and reprinted part of the report:

"Nearly 23.8 million Internet users use online payment services, up 71.7 per cent from half a year ago; 28.9 per cent of Internet users have used their mobile phones to go online within the last six months; and mobile Internet users now number more than 73 million," according to the report.

The most popular service is online music, at 84.5 per cent usage rate, China Web 2.0 Review reported. However, IM usage rates dropped from 81.4 per cent this past January to 77.2 per cent. E-mail use climbed from 56.5 per cent to 62.6 per cent. 81.5 per cent of the online populatin used the Internet to access news.

China's own domain, in which web sites end with the word "cn" instead of "com" or "org" came to 12.18 million. This has enabled China to replace Germany (''de'') as the country with the largest number of national domain names.