China will have an estimated 200 million internet users by 2005 and most will be hungry for news, according to reports from a media forum in Beijing.

The Asia-Pacific Symposium on Press and Scientific Progress was told that in four years China would have 40 million computers connected to the Internet, meaning that roughly 200 million people would have access to the web.

Zhang Chunjiang, vice-minister for China’s information industry, said that more than 60 per cent of information viewed by internet users in China was news. At current rates, it is likely that Internet news media would outstrip television, radio and newspapers in popularity within 10 or 20 years, he said.