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Is Booming China a Threat to Asia?

In: The Asian Insider

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  • Michael Backman

Abstract

Where is China on the scale of economic development? Conventional statistics are poor and so must be supplemented by other statistics. Here’s one of my favourites: how many text messages were sent by mobile phone users in China during the 2003 Chinese New Year holiday period? The answer is more than six billion. People text rather than call because it’s cheaper. So it shows that many ordinary Chinese are affluent enough to own a mobile phone but not affluent enough to make a lot of calls. But texting is like tangoing — it takes two. A text message received inevitably encourages one to be sent back (unlike with voice calls), which is why telephone companies don’t mind them. All that texting proved a bonanza for China Mobile and China Unicom. It earned them US$60.9 million in extra revenue in a week. In 2002, an estimated 95 billion text messages were sent in China.1 Meanwhile, the number of mobile phone users in China reached 240 million by the end of 2003 — more than any other country.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Backman, 2004. "Is Booming China a Threat to Asia?," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: The Asian Insider, chapter 0, pages 183-196, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-4039-4840-3_23
    DOI: 10.1057/9781403948403_23
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