The 6th World Internet Conference kicked off on Oct 20 and will run through Oct 22 in Wuzhen, China's Zhejiang province. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the birth of the internet and also the 25th anniversary of China's access to the internet.

With 25 years of rapid development, China has quickly become an internet giant.

Let's see some of the country's major development achievements in cyberspace over the past 25 years.

The number of Chinese netizens jumped to the top spot in the world in 2008, with internet users totaling 245 million by June of that year.

By the end of 2018, the number of internet users broke 829 million, with new internet users for that year reaching 56.53 million and internet users by cellphone reaching 817 million.

In June 2019, the number of internet users in China hit 854 million, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

The number of top-level domains using Chinese code ".cn" reached 21.24 million by the end of 2018, No 1 worldwide for country and regional domain names over the past three years. Also about 1.72 million domain names use the Chinese characters ".中国", meaning China.

Online payment apps like Alipay and WeChat Pay are popular in almost every Chinese city, offering convenience to both businesses and consumers. [Photo by Bao Xinguo/For China Daily]

By the end of 2018, China's internet availability rate was 50.6 percent and the proportion of internet users by cellphone reached 98.6 percent, figures surpassing the world's level.

In June 2019 the country's internet availability rate reached 61.2 percent, the China Internet Network Information Center said.