Written by: Meenakshi Narayanan
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In 2020, China had 940 million internet users. While 71.8% of these users are concentrated in urban areas, only 28.2% live in rural areas. The average internet penetration of China is around 67%. This ratio for urban areas is as high as 76.5%. However, internet penetration in rural areas in China is only 46.2%. This indicates a huge digital divide between urban and rural China.
Around 42% of China’s population resides in rural regions, and they mainly depend on agriculture for sustenance. Increased internet and mobile connections will bring agricultural development in rural areas by increasing productivity and integrating the rural areas with e-commerce and digital markets.
China Mobile is the largest mobile operator in China, with 950 million mobile customers and 172 million wireless broadband connection customers. In 2019 it delivered broadband access to 43,000 administrative villages, which included providing 38,000 villages with wireline broadband connection and 4,564 villages with 4G network connection.
The company had over 89 million rural information service users in 2018, which increased 37% compared to 2016.
Along with China Unicom, China Mobile invested $5.8 billion in the Telecommunication Universal Service project, which focuses on bridging the digital divide between the rural and urban population. The project focuses on speed upgrade and tariff reduction so that the rural population have equal access to internet.
China Mobile’s IoT based agricultural smartphone tool helped the farmers in Saihu Farm in Ruichang to increase the total yield by 1.05 million kg in 2018. By helping the farmers of Yunnan to adopt e-commerce channels, China Mobile increased the plum sales by 1,000 cases in just 5 days.
China Mobile is rapidly increasing the rural region’s access to the internet by connecting thousands of villages to its broadband and 4g networks every year.
