At less than 50% penetration, China’s internet is still the third-largest country on earth

China’s internet is massive. How massive? According to a new report from CNNIC, more than 668 million people are now using the web in China. That means that were China’s internet a country, it would be the third-largest country on earth, behind only India and China itself. In fact, China’s internet has more people than the two next-largest countries, Indonesia and the United States, combined.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these people are accessing the web (at least some of the time) via their phones. CNNIC says that China has 594 million mobile web users, and that 88.9 percent of mobile phone users are now using their phones to go online.

Amazingly, despite that, internet penetration in China is still below 50 percent. There are another 700 million people in China who haven’t even come online yet.

CNNIC’s report speaks to the amazing size and growth of China’s internet, but it should also be a wake-up call to those China observers who believe the entire country is as developed as Beijing and Shanghai. Even with the recent urbanization, China’s rural population still exceeds 600 million according to 2014 World Bank data, and CNNIC says that just 27.9 percent of those people are online.

Moreover, rural web development is happening fairly slowly; China’s rural web users have grown by just 8 million over the past six months, according to CNNIC. At that rate, it will be 2022 before even half of China’s rural residents are online (although admittedly the rural internet penetration growth rate is likely to speed up, not remain static).