BEIJING -- One in four Chinese Internet users has a blog, with the activity especially popular among students and young office staff, said a report on blog development in China released on Wednesday.

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) surveyed 1,862 Internet users in late November. Extrapolating from this group, CNNIC calculated that 47 million Chinese have blogged, more than one fourth of the 180 million people who have surfed the net in China.  But many blogs have gone blank: only a persistent 36 percent kept their sites updated.

Although small compared with the 1.3 billion population of China, the active blogger population has doubled almost every year. China's first blog appeared in 2002; registered blog spaces exceeded 33 million in 2006

A large proportion of Chinese bloggers are assumed to be students, as the survey showed that more than 30 percent of them earned less than 500 yuan (USD68.5) each month or had no income at all. About 23 percent earned 1,500 to 3,000 yuan, which is the monthly entry-level salary of many white-collar employees in China.