BEIJING — Anyone who spends any time online in China knows surfing the internet is like wading through quicksand. That is especially true when browsing websites not hosted on a Chinese server.

This week, an online report published in China Daily, a state-run, English-language newspaper, said that China, the world’s second-largest economy, ranked an abysmal 91st in the world in internet speed, with the average broadband connection scored at a mere 9.46 megabits per second, or Mbps. There are nearly 200 countries in the world.

The report ranked the top five countries in internet speed as South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Japan and the Netherlands. The average broadband speed in South Korea was reported as 26.7 Mbps. In Sweden, it was 19.1 Mbps.

The data was part of a broader report that was aimed at boasting of China’s internet connectivity, under the title “Evolution of the Internet in China.” The report listed as its sources the China Internet Network Information Center, an agency under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology; the website of People’s Daily, the Communist Party newspaper; the Broadband Development Alliance, a research group; and Akamai Technologies, a content delivery network and cloud services provider based in Cambridge, Mass.