Chinese internet users now heavily rely on their mobile phones to get their dose of the day's news. 

This was among the findings of an annual report on the development of Chinese new media released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) on Tuesday.

According to the report, 93.5 percent of the respondents access the news using their mobile phones, with 77.4 percent of them checking the news daily and 17.8 percent several times a week.

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As of December 2015, there were 688 million internet users in China, and 90.1 percent of them (or 622 million) are mobile phone users.

Asked what was their preferred platform, 68.3 percent of the respondents favored using news apps on their handsets, while 57.8 percent preferred browsers.

WeChat took third place, with WeChat Moment attracting 48.3 percent of Chinese internet users, while WeChat Subscriptions lured in 45 percent of netizens.

Meanwhile, Weibo, another social media app, was the choice of 35.3 percent of respondents.

Based on the report's findings, 88.6 percent of respondents downloaded news apps, with half of them having at least three news apps on their phones and around 40 percent keeping three to five news apps on their mobiles.

The report also revealed that internet penetration in China has reached 50.3 percent, 3.9 percent higher than the global average and 10.1 percent higher than the Asian average.

To date, there are 4.23 million websites operating across the country, a number that is expanding at an annual rate of 26.3 percent.

In the meantime, the volume of e-commerce trade on the mainland has reached 20 trillion yuan ($3.06 trillion), while the internet economy continues to grow at a yearly rate of 30 percent.

And as Chinese internet users shift from their once accustomed news-reading habits, cyber crimes and copyright infringement have also risen with the rapid development of new media, noted CASS Vice-President Li Peilin.

Tagschina, Chinese Internet Users, WeChat