The History of the Internet in China: From a Single Email to the Smart Era

Prologue: Inside and Outside the Great Wall

A small building nestled among the trees within Compound No. 10 in Chaodaogou, Haidian District, Beijing, is home to the China Ordnance Industry Computer Application Technology Research Institute. On September 14, 1987, an email was sent from there across the Pacific Ocean to Geneva, Switzerland. It contained just one sentence—“Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner of the world.”（“Beyond the Great Wall, toward the world.”)

It is widely regarded in the industry as China's first email.

After the test send, please wait for the correct characters from the University of Karlsruhe

This is Chinathe InternetIts first cry. No one could have foreseen that this cry would, over the next three decades, evolve into a digital tidal wave sweeping across 1.1 billion people and reshaping every facet of this ancient civilization.

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Chapter 1: Pioneering Years (1987–1999)

One Internet Cable, One Nation’s Ambition

The Chinese internet took off nearly two decades later than the U.S., but the speed at which it caught up has drawn worldwide attention.

Bronze plaque in front of Building 2 at the Computer Network Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

In 1989, the State Planning Commission included network construction in a World Bank loan project, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences took the lead in establishing the NCFC (Zhongguancun Educational and Scientific Research Demonstration Network). In December 1993, the NCFC backbone network project was completed. On April 20, 1994, a 64K international dedicated line was activated, marking China’s official full-function connection to the Internet—making it the 77th member country worldwide.

This year has been referred to by later generations as ”the first year of the Chinese internet.”

But at that time, the internet was still a luxury beyond the reach of ordinary Chinese people. It wasn’t until 1995 that Zhang Shuxin founded China’s first internet service provider—Yinghaiwei. She erected a huge billboard in Zhongguancun:“How far are the Chinese from the information superhighway? Just 1,500 meters to the north.”

That billboard is a metaphor for an era: the internet is right before our eyes, but most people still don’t know which way to go.

The Rise of the Portals: The Three Musketeers and an Era

In 1996, the State Council Leading Group on Informatization was established, marking the beginning of a period of rapid growth for the Internet in China.

Around 1998, a group of individuals who would later be known as the ”Three Musketeers of the Internet” emerged—Ding Lei, Wang Zhidong, Zhang ChaoyangDing Lei founded NetEase, Wang Zhidong founded Sina, and Zhang Chaoyang founded Sohu. With the emergence of these three major portal sites, information was taken out of the hands of newspapers and television for the first time and placed at the fingertips of ordinary people.

That same year, Ma Huateng founded Tencent in Shenzhen. Its first product was called OICQ—later renamed QQ. No one could have imagined that this clunky instant messaging tool would become the most widely used social platform in China over the next two decades.

In early 1999, an English teacher named Jack Ma returned to Hangzhou and founded Alibaba in an apartment. He told his team of eighteen people, ”We’re going to build the world’s largest e-commerce company.” No one took him seriously.

But history has always been written by those who are not taken seriously.

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Chapter 2: The Boom (2000–2010)

The Nasdaq Bell

On April 13, 2000, Sina.com went public on the NASDAQ, becoming the first internet stock to originate from mainland China. NetEase and Sohu followed suit, and China’s internet industry ushered in its first wave of capital frenzy.

However, the bubble soon burst. In 2001, the global dot-com winter set in, and countless companies went under. But the true survivors rose from the ashes.

In 2003, SARS unexpectedly served as a catalyst for e-commerce. Taobao was launched in May, completely reshaping the C2C market landscape. That same year, Tencent launched the QQ Games Hall, and NetEase entered the online gaming market—Ding Lei would later be hailed as ”the trailblazer of China’s online gaming industry,” a title he certainly deserved.

Alipay was launched in 2004.

In August 2005, Baidu went public on the Nasdaq. Robin Li—the founder of China’s search engine—made search the primary gateway for Chinese people to access information, guided by the motto ”Simplifying the complex world through technology.”

On June 30, 2005, the number of Internet users in China surpassed 100 million for the first time.

The demographic dividend of the digital age is growing at an unstoppable pace.

The Mobile Revolution: From the PC to the Pocket

In 2008, China’s internet user base reached 253 million, making it the world’s largest for the first time. That same year, the iPhone was released, marking the beginning of the global mobile internet era.

China’s response was swift. It entered the 3G era in 2009, issued 4G licenses in 2013, and launched commercial 5G services in 2019—building the world’s largest 5G network.

In the mobile sector, a new generation of leaders has emerged:

• Lei JunBy founding Xiaomi, he shattered the price barriers in the smartphone market with his ”value-for-money” approach, putting the internet truly in everyone's pocket.
• Wang XingHe founded Meituan, expanding from group buying into food delivery, travel, and ride-hailing to build China’s largest local lifestyle service platform. He is aptly dubbed ”the youngest record-holder for the highest IPO market capitalization.”
• Liu QiangdongHe led JD.com to its IPO, built its own logistics network, and carved a niche in Alibaba’s dominant market with its ”authentic, genuine products” and ”next-day delivery” services.
• Zhou HongyiHe burst onto the market with 360 Security Guard and, through his free business model, brought an end to the era of paid antivirus software in China. Although he made countless enemies—including a legal battle with Robin Li and the ”3Q War” with Pony Ma—he did indeed transform cybersecurity from a luxury into a necessity.

And as this decade draws to a close, an even more disruptive force is taking shape.

In 2012, Zhang Yiming founded ByteDance. What he introduced was not just a product, but an entirely new approach to content distribution—Recommendation Algorithms.

“Information finding people” has replaced ”people finding information.” The rise of Douyin and Toutiao marks China’s transition from the search era to the algorithm era. This is a profound paradigm shift, the impact of which continues to grow to this day.

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Chapter 3: Industry Giants and Ecosystems (2010–2020)

Ten People, One Era

If one were to select ten pivotal figures from the golden decade of China’s internet, the following list would be virtually undisputed:

These ten individuals were born between 1964 and 1974 and launched their startups between the second quarter of 1998 and the fourth quarter of 1999. Wu Xiaobo refers to them as ”the generation of China’s internet”—they not only founded companies but also defined the business norms of an era.

Data: The Birth of a Supermarket

As of December 2024, the number of internet users in China reached1.108 billion people, Internet penetration has risen to78.6%. This is the world's largest network—with the most users and the widest coverage.

Average mobile broadband download speed: 5G reaches228.75 Mbit/s(2023 data).

This isn’t just a number; it’s the infrastructure of a digital marketplace.

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Chapter 4: Governance and Security (2016–2024)

Cyberspace is not a lawless zone

As the internet becomes increasingly embedded in the fabric of society, security and governance have become issues that cannot be ignored.

The ”September 1 Cyber War” of 2016 marked a turning point—it was the first time China demonstrated its ability to retaliate in a cyber conflict, successfully striking back through measures such as network blockades, IP tracking, and information warfare. This incident directly accelerated the pace of cybersecurity legislation.

Since then, a series of regulations have been introduced in rapid succession:

• 2017The Cybersecurity Law has officially come into effect.
• October 2023The National Data Bureau has been officially established to promote the market-based circulation of data as a production factor.
• 2023The "Regulations on the Protection of Minors Online" have been issued—China's first comprehensive legislation specifically dedicated to the online protection of minors.
• 2024The "Regulations on the Security Management of Internet Data" and the "Measures for the Identification of AI-Generated and Synthetic Content" have been successively issued.
• 2024The State Administration for Market Regulation has issued the "Interim Provisions on Combating Unfair Competition on the Internet," thereby filling a legislative gap.

The data security industry has been explicitly defined as an ”emerging sector.” Cybersecurity is no longer merely a technical issue, but a core component of national security.

At the same time, the Internet Society of China has released its annual list of ”Ten Major Events Shaping the Development of China’s Internet Industry” for several consecutive years, covering topics ranging from artificial intelligence governance to cross-border data flows, and from the industrial internet to the open-source ecosystem, painting a comprehensive picture of a landscape driven by both policy and technology.

In 2023, the number of software and hardware ecosystem integrations for domestic operating systems surpassed5 million, an increase compared to the same period in 2022400%Open source is becoming the new infrastructure of China’s digital industry.

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Chapter 5: The AI Era—From Tool to Infrastructure (2023–Future)

The Explosion of Large Language Models: China’s ”DeepSeek Moment”

By the end of 2022, ChatGPT had taken the world by storm. China’s response was remarkably swift.

In 2023, the number of domestically developed large language models exceeded200, with the core artificial intelligence industry reaching a scale of500 billion yuan, with the number of companies exceeding4,400In July 2023, the *Interim Measures for the Administration of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services* were issued, setting clear guidelines for AI development while also accelerating its progress.

By 2024, multimodal large language models will have become mainstream. Foundational models such as Tongyi Qianwen and DeepSeek are rapidly closing the gap with the world’s leading models and are being open-sourced across the entire industry chain—China is building the ”Android ecosystem” of the AI era.

By 2025, ChinaAI Programming ToolsThe market size reaches2.45 billion yuan, annual growth rate187.3%. Among China's 9.4 million programmers, there are already29.8%Become a developer specializing in human-machine collaboration.

AI is no longer just a toy in the lab. It is becoming a basic utility, just like water and electricity.

The Next Decade: Six Disruptive Changes

As we stand at the threshold of 2026 and look ahead to the period from 2026 to 2035, the development of artificial intelligence in China will unfold along six main lines:

First, the computing power revolution. A three-tiered cloud-edge-device collaboration model has emerged as the new paradigm. With large-scale model training in the cloud, real-time inference at edge nodes, and lightweight local computing at the device level, this three-tiered computing architecture is replacing the old model of ”computing power concentrated in massive supercomputing centers.” By 2030, the number of IoT devices worldwide will exceed 50 billion, with each device equipped with a dedicated NPU computing unit. By 2035, the global edge computing market is projected to exceed $800 billion.

Second, the rise of artificial intelligence. AI will evolve from a ”passive tool” into an ”autonomous decision-making partner.” Around 2027, general-purpose AI agents will reach a commercial inflection point. For individuals, AI assistants will autonomously plan health checkups, travel, and learning programs; for businesses, digital employees will take over end-to-end tasks such as supply chain management, financial reporting and tax filing, and customer operations. It is predicted that by 2032, the global market size for enterprise digital AI agents will exceedtrillion dollars.

Third, multimodal fusion. By 2030, the universal foundation model will be capable of simultaneously analyzing multidimensional data—including medical images, genetic sequences, and abnormal noises from equipment—with an overall diagnostic accuracy exceeding 95% and a failure rate in industrial equipment maintenance and operations reduced by more than 60%.

Fourth, the implementation of embodied intelligence. AI-powered smartphones, AI PCs, and AR glasses are becoming the mainstream of next-generation consumer electronics. Humanoid service robots and full-scenario autonomous driving are entering a period of rapid industrialization. The boundaries between the digital and physical worlds are dissolving.

Fifth, the phased arrival of AGI. Leading scientists worldwide have reached a consensus: domain-specific quasi-general intelligence will emerge between 2025 and 2030, and prototypes of cross-domain preliminary general artificial intelligence will be developed between 2030 and 2035. While fully human-equivalent AGI will require a longer timeframe, the trajectory is now irreversible.

Sixth, AI is reshaping GDP. Currently, AIGC accounts for only about 11 trillion yuan of global GDP. By 2030, AI is projected to contribute 141 trillion yuan to global GDP (approximately $15.7 trillion). By 2035, the agent and robotics economy will generate 451 trillion yuan of global GDP (approximately $80.4 trillion).

Huawei’s *Smart World 2035* report puts forward a key principle—“The Computing Cost Singularity”: When the value of AI applications is ten times the cost of computing power, the AI industry will experience explosive growth.

This singularity is fast approaching.

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Epilogue: From the Great Wall to the Stars

In 1987, a letter read: ”Cross the Great Wall and march toward the world.”

By 2026, China’s 1.1 billion internet users will no longer be merely ”going global”—they will be using AI to rewrite the rules of the world.

From web portals to mobile payments, from recommendation algorithms to large language models, from social networks to artificial agents—in just thirty years, China’s internet has covered ground that took others half a century to traverse. And the destination of this journey is not a single app or platform, but an entirely new form of civilization:Smart Society.

Over the next decade, China will not only be a user of AI, but also a builder of AI infrastructure, a formulator of AI governance rules, and a shaper of the AI industrial ecosystem.

Beyond the Great Wall lies a vast expanse of stars and the sea.

This time, it’s not about reaching out to the world—it’s about bringing the world into the future we define.