Chinese people are now spending more time surfing the net than watching TV, according to results of a survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) published Thursday.

The survey, of citizens of five Chinese cities, found that 79 percent of interviewees use the internet for information, and 55.1 percent prefer to read news on the internet. The average times spent surfing the net and watching TV were 2.73 hours and 1.29 hours, respectively.

"To our surprise, only 63 percent of the interviewees use e-mail," Guo Liang, a researcher with the CASS said.

Only 10.4 percent reported using the internet primarily to send and receive email; 65.9 percent read online news; 62.2 quite often play games on-line. More and more people have taken an interest in the entertainment opportunities online. Up to 56.5 percent of interviewees quite often download music, and 53.5 percent get entertainment messages from the internet.

Yet the survey found that television is still the dominant mass medium. Seventy-nine percent of interviewees choose to watch TV to get information, and another 75 percent take newspapers as important as TV.

Five major web sites in the Chinese language, namely Sina, Sohu, Netease, Baidu and Yahoo are still ranked top ones by web users, and those that voted for Sina as the best among them were 30.9 percent.

Authorized statistics showed that web users in China have already exceeded 100 million, second to that of the United States.

(Xinhua News Agency July 8, 2005)