China v America:
how do the two countries compare?
How do China and America compare on the internet? We add this to our facts about the powers each country yields
China v the US: how the countries match up. Illustration: Mark McCormick for the GuardianWhen Hu Jintao visited the White House earlier this year, we picked some key facts about China and the USA to compare the two superpowers.
Since then the people over at Pingdom have put together their own fact comparison of China and the US, this time with an emphasis on internet usage and the online industry.
Like us, they picked some of their figures from the CIA World factbook, but they also drew from the Internet World Stats website.
We have collected all the statistics from the Pingdom report into a spreadsheet on in the data section below.In addition the Pingdom team summarise their findings as:
- China's Internet user base is bigger, much bigger (1.76x that of the United States).
The US Internet infrastructure is still way ahead of China's, at least for end users.
China has much more potential for growth in spite of already being the largest country on the Internet.
China's Internet users run older versions of software than the US Internet users are, at least when it comes to operating systems and web browsers.
The strong hosting industry in the United States keeps the nation ahead, especially since Internet users from all over the world use its services. (One might ask how long that will last, though.) We also spotted the great potential of China in our figures. Perhaps the most extreme contrast we found was in the current account balance of the two countries, which showed that the US has been growing the world's largest deficit burden, while China has been running with the world's greatest budget surplus.
The GDP growth was another big contrast, the GPD growth of China is 9.6% compared to just 2.6% for the 3rd quarter of 2010.
Despite these big differences showing China's power for growing, the domestic market capitatlisation given by the world federation of exchanges was still $15tn for the US compared to only $3.6 tn for China.
We have covered before the amount of US stock that China owns, which gives an indication of country power.
So it seems our findings fit with those of Pingdom, that the balance power looks set to be shifting. What other facts would you like to know about America and China?
Data summary
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