BEIJING: Proving prophets of collapse in China wrong, Internet which entered the Communist nation two decades ago has transformed lives of over 600 million Chinese besides changing the face of the most populous country, raking up $ 160 billion e-commerce last year.
When Robin Li Yanhong, a Chinese engineer in Silicon Valley in California started his search engine company in a small hotel room near Beijing in 2000, he did not think that he was lighting up a giant online network which now turned out to be world's highest with over 618 million subscribers.
Now his company, Baidu, has become the dominant Internet search engine in China with more than a 60 per cent market share, and hundreds of millions users.
Jack Ma or Ma Yun, was an English teacher in east China's city of Hangzhou before he started to build websites for Chinese companies.
Now he owns China's largest e-commerce group called Alibaba.
By March last year, Ma's Taobao.com and Tmall.com had a trade volume of one trillion Yuan ($ 160 billion).
In 2013, China's online retail market expanded to over 1.8 trillion yuan, almost the size of Malaysia's GDP that year.
"We have built up the Chinese people's trust in online transactions. China will become more open, more transparent, more willing to share in the next two decades because of the Internet," he said.
Internet also politically reshaped China opening up the rigid system challenging the hold the monopolistic official media under the control of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), though the Party managed to survive the Internet revolution.
As China-based social networking apps such as WeChat and Sina Weibo, the Chinese twitter made giant stridesBSE 0.12 percent with millions of subscribers, the CPC now struggling to cope up with the fast expanding social media with a host of firewalls.
Commercially intent proved to be a boon to China as Weibo, Chinese Twitter, made its debut this month on the Nasdaq exchange with a 19.1 percent jump, raking up $ 287 million.
The success of the microblogging service, which official figures say over 500 million are using, highlighted the innovation-driven development of China's Internet companies.
Weibo may have imitated Twitter at first, but it adapted and improved by constantly introducing new functions to maintain a high number of active users.
"More Chinese Internet companies will be going abroad like Weibo did," said Fang Xingdong, founder of Blogchina. com and an IT columnist.
"The year of 2014 will mark the beginning of the global strategy of China's Internet," he told state-run Xinhua news agency.
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