BEIJING, Oct. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Lu Li, a 23-year-old working with aforeign firm in East China's Shanghai, has found surfing online indispensable in her daily life since she first accessed to the Internet seven years ago.

    "It has unfolded a new chapter in my life," she says, adding that she can hardly imagine living without the Internet.

    Lu is one of the new generation emerging in the country in thepast ten years, who are learning, entertaining and shopping all electronically. A report released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) in July indicates that China has 103 million netizens, or Internet users, like Lu Li.

    That means one out of 13 Chinese uses the Internet. Ten years ago, there were barely 50,000 Internet accounts throughout China. A survey on some 2,400 people in five Chinese cities show that an average netizen spends 2.73 hours online daily, reading news, sending or receiving emails, playing games, downloading music, gathering background materials or chatting.

    Driving force

    Mao Wei, director of the CNNIC, hails the country's Internet population of 103 million as "a milestone figure," which represents a 100-time increase in seven years.

    In connection, 45.6 million computers across China have been linked to the Internet, a 25.6 percent climb over the previous year.

    What's more significant, Mao says, is that broadband users account for half of the figure, standing at 53 million.

    "Broadband has made things more convenient to the netizens, with more services available to them," says Wang En'hai, an official with the CNNIC.

    A major driving force of the rapid development of the Internetin China in the past decade is the government's promotion. Since its formal integration into the global networks on April 20, 1994,there were "information highway" projects in the late 1990s to bring government departments at various levels to "go online," which made even remote governments on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau accessible to the Internet.

    Business is also a driving force. With the construction of four backbone networks from 1994 to 1996, numerous start-ups and portal websites mushroomed. Then, "in the late 1990s, dazzling web-page is a trump for companies to scrabble for netizens," says Huang Chengqing, secretary-general of the Internet Society of China (ISC).