There were 35.93 million domain names registered within China as of the end of 2021, up more than 4.5 million in 12 months, from 31.36 million, according to the English version of the 49th Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development published in April.
The report covers a comprehensive range of internet resources in China, including mobile phone base stations, broadband access ports, fibre optic cables, broadband access, number of internet users and their demographics and how the internet is used. The number and handling of cybersecurity incidents are also covered. When it comes to internet use, China had over one billion (1,032 million) netizens, up 42.96 million from December 2020, and internet penetration reached 73.0%, up 2.6 percentage points in 12 months.
In the 12 months to the end of December 2021, the number of .cn domains rose 5.3 million while .com domains were only up 700,000. The total number of .cn domain names was 20.41 million (56.8%) while there were 10.65 million (29.6%) .com domains. This compares to 15.09 million (48.1%) .cn domains and 11.34 million (36.2%) .com domains as of December 2020 according to the 48th Statistical Report on China’s Internet Development.
In other TLDs there were another 0.21 million (0.6%) .中国 domains, the same number as in 2020 when their market share was 0.7%. There were also 3.62 million (10.1%) registered in new gTLDs, which was up marginally from 2020’s 3.61 million when their market share was 11.5%.
As of the end of December 2021, China had 2.72 million websites with .cn domain names, down 8.0% from December 2020, according to the report. There were also 335 billion web pages in China, up 6.2% from December 2020. Of these, there were 225.6 billion static web pages and 109.3 billion dynamic web pages, accounting for 67.4% and 32.6% of the total respectively.
Going back 10 years, one can see the development of the internet in China has been monumental. As of December 2011, there were 7.75 million domain names in China, of which there were 3.53 million .cn domain names and 2.30 million Chinese websites, which was reported in CNNIC’s 29th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China.
The report also covers IPv6 in China with the number of IPv6 addresses amounting to 63,052 blocks/32, up 9.4% over December 2020. Of the 23 public recursive services with global visibility under the monitoring of CNNIC, 13 offer IPv6 public recursive services.
For the report, CNNIC reports the numbers of .cn and.中国 domain names are derived from their database, while those under gTLDs are provided by domestic registrars.
After excluding Tokelau’s .tk, with a freemium model and lack of verifiable data, Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief now ranks .cn as the third largest top-level domain in the world behind .com with 160.0 million domain names, and the second largest of the country code top-level domains behind Germany’s .de (17.2 million).
There is an archive of CNNIC’s Statistical Report on Internet Development in China available here.