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Social media use grew 300% in China last year and more than half of the country's 500 million users are on a social network, according to a government report released last week.

And that's why Chinese New Year became the most micro-blogged event in history, with 481,207 messages posted in the first minute of the year on a Chinese, Twitter-like service, as well as 32,312 messages posted in a single second: well above Twitter's record of 25,088 tweets in a second. Still, many Chinese, both in China and abroad, are finding ways to use Twitter to talk free of government censorship.

Pro-Internet freedom Americans aren't the only ones who got pumped up about this Wednesday's Internet blackout day.

The L.A. Times reports that Chinese Internet users praised American Internet users for taking action against their own government. Wen Yunchao, a prominent Chinese blogger and government critic who left the mainland for Hong Kong, says that China's Great Firewall, which was initially about stopping online piracy and pornography, quickly became about Internet censorship of websites and content. Critics of SOPA/PIPA say that it would, in effect, do the same thing to the Internet in America.

Terry Gou, chairman of Taipei-based Hon Hai, Foxconn's parent company, called his employees animals at a recent company party, according to Want China Times. Foxconn makes many of the devices Western consumers use, such as the iPhone and the Kindle.

"Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide," he said, "and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache."

China Real Time, the Wall Street Journal's blog devoted to the world's second-largest country, has developed and launched China Econtracker, a valuable tool to access and understand economic data on the country.

Dealing with the statistical bureaus of the world's second-largest economy is even less pleasant than it sounds. So the Journal has created this well-organized, graphically effective and easy-to-use site. It organizes data by month-to-month and year-over-year presentations and users can switch from one to the other.

Mark Zuckerberg's closely-watched, 2010 trip to China isn't the only reason why Facebook may be the safe bet on which of the major U.S.-based social networks will be the first to get the go-ahead to operate in China.

Access to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are all currently banned by the Chinese government. Google may be renewing expansion efforts in China, but a recent crackdown on popular Chinese microblogging sites designed to mimic Twitter suggest that if any of the big three get the permission to operate in China, the nod will go to Facebook.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that Google is going back to China. Two years ago, facing censorship from the Chinese government, Google pulled out of mainland China, redirecting users to uncensored results from Hong Kong. Google took a stand against China's authoritarian regime, but it did so reluctantly. China is too tempting a market for Google to write off.

Nevertheless, the WSJ reports that Google is hiring more engineers, salespeople and product managers and building new consumer Web services. As China's mobile market booms, Google is pushing Android there, and opening a Chinese Android Market for mobile apps is one of the top priorities.

Chinese smartphone manufacturer ZTE jumped ahead of Apple worldwide last year, according to IDG. ZTE doubled its shipped products in the fourth quarter of 2011 over the third and increased year-over-year by almost 60%. They now own just under 5% of global market share.

Now, ZTE has announced an anticipating doubling of its sales over the next year, with the United States becoming its primary market by 2015, according to Bloomberg.

Described by gaming site Kotaku as a potentially "deadly game of chicken," over 300 workers at the Foxconn factory in China threatened suicide. On Jan. 2, a group of workers appeared on the roof of the main production facility in Wuhan and threatened to jump.

Foxconn produces devices for Microsoft (including the Xbox360), Apple (the iPhone and iPad), Sony (PlayStation3) and Nintendo (the Wii), as well as the Amazon Kindle.

A new study from Forrester proves that the majority of Americans are a bunch of lazy re-tweeters. 93% of online consumers in the emerging markets of China, India, Mexico and Brazil use social media tools at least once-a-month. U.S. and European consumers are far more likely to view social media as a spectator sport, joining it and then just watching it fly by.

In the U.S., 68% of social media users are "joiners," which means they maintain a profile on a social networking site and visit social networks. 73% are "spectators," or users who mostly just read blogs, online forums, customer ratings/reviews and tweets, listen to podcasts and watch videos. This number is strikingly similar in Europe (EU-7 countries, to be specific), with 69% of users classified as spectators and 50% as joiners.

The urge for control is powerful, made exponentially more so whenever two or more representatives of a government get together. Among the more prominent, and ridiculous, examples of this trend are Iran's attempt to create a "halal" Internet (ostensibly to safeguard Muslim sensibilities, in reality to control the political thought of Iranian citizens) and the American former intelligence chief's proposal for a ".secure" Internet in which users would voluntarily give up their Fourth Amendment rights.

Add to this China's "national" global positioning system. This Chinese satellite navigation network will obviate the need to use the Pentagon-created and U.S.-run GPS system, which dominates location technology worldwide.