China’s notorious Great Firewall — or as they call it, the Golden Shield — is known for blocking some high profile sites. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are
all victims. But that has not kept the world’s most populous country
from getting into social networking. Some 500 million Chinese citizens
are online and a quarter of the world’s social network users live under
the firewall.
So how then, do the Chinese connect online? On their own series of
social networks, mimicking several blocked foreign counterparts. Renren
and Kaixin001 fill Facebook’s void. Sina Weibo is the microblog of
choice in Twitter’s absence. Youku is a video hosting platform, which
only loosely enforces copyright laws; think of it as a
YouTube-meets-Hulu, because many popular TV shows and movies are posted
freely. Jiepang is the most popular location-based mobile app, with
Foursquare-style checkins.
This infographic,
created by G+ (not to be confused with Google+), takes a look at
China’s answer to social networking. Of the country’s half billion
Internet users, half of them are on multiple social networks and 30% log
into at least one network each day. Chinese citizens spend an average
of 2.7 hours online per day second to only the Japanese.
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