Time for the CNNIC (China Internet Information Network Center - 中国互联网信息中心) 28th edition biannual Chinese internet review! According to CNNIC, an estimated 485 million people in China are believed to be using the internet (almost twice that of the US), as well as 317.68 million mobile internet users. The CNNIC believes that the total number of Chinese internet users can break the 500 million mark by the end of 2011. more ›

I love it when memes cross borders! Some savvy Chinese netizens have uploaded a Downfall parody of one of the (many) weibo (China's Twitter) scandals rocking China lately. Earlier this month, a luddite official from Jiangsu, laboring under the misapprehension that microblogs are private, arranged for an extramarital affair with his mistress across the public forum. more ›

The Washington Post is reporting that Google's shiny new attempt at an answer to Facebook, Google+ (in "field trials" right now, probably just to make it sound cooler as it remains "invite only") has already been blocked in China! more ›

Hey Sina Weibo users, you can now follow Alibaba Group CEO Jack Ma! Alibaba is the internet giant behind eCommerce platform Taobao. Ma's inaugural post, tagged "Zen and the art of environmental conservation", has received over 2000 comments. Follow him and us! Not sure how to set up a Sina Weibo account? Lucky for you, the folks over at World of Chinese just wrote you a idiot'snon-Chinese-speaker's guide! And if that's not enough, Digicha's guide has lots of pictures. more ›

The Guardian brings us this little nugget today: A former prisoner at a labor camp in Jixi reports that prisoners are being forced to mine "virtual gold" online for up to 12 hours at a time, in addition to their daily physical labor. If you're unfamiliar with the term "gold farming", it basically refers to the building up of online currency (like weapons, credits, character levels, whathaveyou) with hours of play, which is then sold for real money to gamers. From the Guardian: more ›

Have you ever wanted to become internet famous in China? Turns out, all you have to do is set up a food stand outside your local Chinese university and have the cops run you out. Oh also, be French. more ›

This neat little infographic from Endelman Digital maps out the social media habits of internet users all across Asia. The data used comes from PC-based internet users only, leaving out the very substantial chunk of Asians staring at the internet through their phone or at an internet cafe. But anyway, it's pretty to look at, and gives a nice clear peak at user habits, as well as Facebook's slow and steady world domination. (Penn Olson points out that Facebook actually does surpass Wretch in Taiwan, with 58% online penetration.) more ›

Chinese netizens have dubbed this woman 李刚妹, or "Li Gang's sister" after she was caught on camera screaming at a woman she'd just seriously injured with her red Mazda 3 series: more ›

These are cool. PINLE's (品乐) Taobao store has loads of slightly contentious shirts, all priced at 45 to 55RMB, and all pretty cool. We particularly like the Iniernet Explorst error message shirt and the 拆 shirt (pronounced chāi, meaning "tear down", and made up of lots of other characters like "communism", "culture" and "serve the people!") more ›

Dragon’s Laugh (龙颜大悦) is an online volunteer production group that puts together weekly mash-up videos to distribute online. In operation since June 2010, the group of over 300 volunteers has put together 39 videos. These videos have enjoyed wide popularity among netizens and have also been reported by official newspapers and TV stations all over the country, including; Beijing Evening News, Shanghai News Morning Post, and China Youth Daily. Their latest production provides the view from cyberspace of the recent NPC/CPPCC meetings, with the dialogue mostly coming from real comments posted online on Sina Microblog or other online forums. Put together, it provides a 15-minute overview of netizens’ views of the meetings. This video is currently banned from all video-sharing websites inside of China. The full video is below with English subtitles provided by CDT.

Gmail has denied any faults within their own system after their services in China have been constantly disrupted for weeks now. We've heard rumors that the strategy is to slow down or even block Gmail every 15 minutes, in order to convince users that it's a problem with Google, not the firewall. Sure, you all say, we aren't dummies, we know what's happening. Okay, but can somebody please tell that to Google's shrinking share in the Chinese market, and somehow convince them, yet again, not to move their business elsewhere? more ›

This video, supposedly of an extraterrestrial spotted by a cameraman in Hong Kong, has racked up 2.5 million views over the past week on Youku. Can't imagine how this made it into an actual news broadcast. It looks like somebody's bad attempt at a viral marketing campaign. Except that somehow it's totally successful, and Chinese net users are eating it up -- 'extraterrestrial' (外星人, wàixīngrén) is now one of the top 20 trending terms on Sina Weibo. more ›

We totally dig what they're doing over at World of Chinese these days: serving up a daily list of China's trending topics on Baidu and Sina Weibo, in Chinese and English, with full explanation for each topic. Charlie Custer of China Geeks is behind the lists, informative and insightful as always. Super duper interesting, and an excellent way to stay up to date with what's being talked about online in China. more ›

If any of you haven't been having problems with your internet connection, your VPN, or your Gmail over the past few weeks, then consider yourselves extremely lucky (and send us your VPN info plz.) Since those pesky flower-related non-protests began happening a month ago, inconveniently coinciding with the legislative sessions, things have been haywire all across the interwebz in China. Is this temporary? God we hope so. more ›

Check out this supposedly record-breaking clip that's trending on Youku right now, entitled "Kung Fu Iron Fist." It's been posted multiple times, each posting drawing hundreds of thousands of hits and hundreds of comments (mostly speculation as to the type and authenticity of the bricks.) The guy counting says 37, but I only counted 36... more ›

Groupon's China site Gaopeng.com went live today, officially registering emails with plans to start advertising group-buy deals in early March. The site is headquartered in Beijing and will initially offer deals in Shanghai and Beijing, with plans to expand soon. After their Super Bowl commercial gaffe and an anti-Groupon alliance among Chinese competitors, we'll be watching carefully to see what comes of the new Tencent-partnered endeavor. more ›

Clear, informative, and to the point, Digicha's 20-page guide to Sina Weibo is super useful for those of you still coming to terms with your Chinese microblogging account. more ›

Whether or not you think the whole will-they-wont-they Facebook China flirtation is a total pipe dream, there is no arguing that a jump in Chinese Facebook users is a good sign for the social media giant. And that's just what we've seen. In the last two months alone, users in China more than doubled from about 300,000 to over 700,000. The only explanation come up with so far is that Mark Zuckerberg's China visit in December inspired a slew of new Facebook devotees. more ›

A surprisingly subversive and violent video created by a Beijing-based animation studio has been circulating widely throughout the Chinese internets since Monday (it was taken off Tudou and now only exists on Youtube). It makes reference to a wide range of inharmonious news items, such as the melamine milk scandal, the Li Gang scandal, violent demolitions, and the beating of protesters, and ends with what looks like a call for the violent overthrow of the government (the tigers) by the people (the rabbits.) more ›

Just in time for Mark Zuckerberg's rumored China visit (he and his gf travel 2gthr every Dec!!1 ZOMG! lol so romantic) Tech Rice brings us a look at just how Facebook might fare against the local competitors IF (and it's a big if) the market were free from intervention and there was no censorship or invasive meddling among the internetz by the government. Still, they make some interesting points worth noting, considering most have approached Facebook's China rumblings with reactions mostly fluctuating between dismissal or disbelief. Boiled down, here's what Tech Rice has to say: more ›

“We have to carve off China. That one is extremely complex and has its own dynamics... Our theory is that if we can show that we as a Western company can succeed in a place where no other country has, then we can start to figure out the right partnerships we would need to succeed in China on our terms." more ›

We all saw this one coming: an open letter written by CCP elders calling for more freedom of speech in China is being rapidly censored from the Chinese internet. Chinese Twitter users report that copies of the letter have been removed in the past 24 hours at a frightening pace. more ›

One of our favorite web comics, xkcd, has updated their map of the internet if it were represented as a planet and - lo and behold - there's an entire section dedicated to the Chinese internet. Love the details like a "Ma Le Ge Bi desert" and "Grass Mud Horse Bay" - somebody's been reading up on Chinese internet issues! The entire map can be found here. more ›

Thomas Crampton's blog drew our attention today to a report released back in June by the Data Center of China Internet (DCCI) on the amount of online user-generated content in China. As it turns out, there is a lot of it. more ›

“This approval is a significant change for Chinese language users worldwide,” said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN. “One fifth of the world speaks Chinese and that means we just increased the potential online accessibility for roughly a billion people.”

Currently, internet penetration in China is at 28.9% - which puts the amount of internet users at 384 million. But if the Information Office of the State Council has its way, a full 45% of the people will get internet in the next five years. Of course, the internet they'll be getting, while it purports to guarantee "citizen's freedom of speech," will not allow them to "infringe upon state, social and collective interests or the legitimate freedom and rights of other citizens." Whatever that means. more ›

The Business Insider recently published a bar graph comparing the internet activities of United States of users with those of Chinese users. While some activities, like pursuing an online education or watching online video (one in the same, really), were statistically similar between the two counties, other activities were far more common in one country than the other, revealing some fundamental differences in Chinese and American tendencies. more ›

• Black Future: The coal bosses of Shanxi are tired of being the government's whipping boys [Forbes] "One of the most reviled and reclusive villains in the Chinese economy has been the coal mine boss. The archetypal robber baron of the Chinese Gilded Age, he has been caricatured as ruthless, greedy, corrupt and uncivilized. Now the coal mine boss is casting himself as a human rights case. The government of China's coal-rich Shanxi Province, southwest of Beijing, is trying to drive almost all private mine owners out of business, forcing more than 1,500 mines to shut down or sell out to state-owned enterprises at prices so low, coal bosses say, that some may go bankrupt."
• Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years [Read Write Web] "Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time."
• The French Connection’s China Connection [WSJ] "A French court Tuesday sentenced two businessmen convicted in the arms-for-oil “Angolagate” scandal that implicated 42 defendants including top politicians, civil servants and even the son of late Socialist President Francois Mitterrand. One of the two, and a chief defendant in the case, is Pierre Falcone, who’s now in jail pending an appeal on the charges he helped arrange shipments of $790 million worth of weapons to Angola in the mid-1990s."

According to a presentation by MTV about youth and social networking in Asia, China is the only country where people actually have more ONLINE friends than offline friends. We guess that's not so surprising coming from the Land of 1,000 Internet Addiction Camps, but it still makes us want to go all Ogre on these kids. NERDS!! more ›

• Taiwan to Allow Dalai Lama Visit [NY Times] "The president of Taiwan said Thursday that he would allow the Dalai Lama to visit the island next week, a move likely to infuriate China and jeopardize rapidly improving relations between Taipei and Beijing. The Tibetan spiritual leader is expected to arrive Monday for a six-day tour of southern Taiwan, which was ravaged by a typhoon three weeks ago that left at least 650 dead."
• Thousands of Myanmar refugees flowing into Yunnan [Go Kunming] "An attempt by Myanmar's ruling military junta to bring rebel ethnic fighters under its control has led to escalating tensions, reports of fighting and a looming specter of war, with thousands of refugees fleeing into southwestern Yunnan, according to a Reuters report. China- and Thailand-based media outlets have reported that on August 8 the Myanmar army sent hundreds of troops to the region of Kokang in the country's northeastern Shan State. Kokong, which has held to a 20-year ceasefire with the Myanmar government in Yangon, is home to many ethnic Chinese as well as other ethnic groups."
• Conrad Black: Much ado about China [National Post] "Overblown announcements heralding the supposed coming of the Age of China have become a staple of journalistic futurism in recent years. When Maclean's magazine banners across the top of its cover "When China Rules the World," as it did last month -- and it is not a Monty Python send-up of swarms of incomprehensible people in Mao suits -- I know it is time to raise a peep of dissent."