China has been online for two decades now.

The Middle Kingdom celebrated its twenty years of "Internet Life" by issuing a special set of commemorative stamps that were unveiled in Nanjing on Sunday.

The set, designed by animation director, Jia Kun, contains four commemorative stamps bearing themes that depict how the Chinese use the Internet: "online communication," "e-commerce," "mobile connection," and "cloud computing." 

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China officially hooked up to Internet on April 20, 1994, the 77th country to join the worldwide web.

By December 2013, it had 618 million Internet users.  In 2011, these netizens spent an average of 18.7 hours online per week, or around 472 billion hours a year.

Wireless Internet access via mobile devices also developed rapidly, and now boasts of around 500 million users.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said local websites grew to 3.23 million by the end of 2009, increasing by 12.3 percent annually.

Although the central government exercises control over the Internet through state ownership of access routes, the country's online community is one of the most vibrant in the world.

Netizens actively engage in public discussions of current issues on Weibo, their own version of Twitter. 

They enhance their awareness of hot topics by searching them on Baidu, China's version of google.

Their leading e-commerce and messaging portals, Alibaba and Tencent, have raked in billions in revenue and are listed in US stock markets.

Foreign film and television drama producers have been cashing in on the Chinese netizens' love for foreign entertainment, with such runaway hits as "House of Cards" gaining following among China's party officers, and South Korea's "You who came from the stars" becoming a popular hit among the rest of the populace.