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.

While English-language users may lament the 140-character limit Twitter places on messages, users who tweet in character-based languages like Chinese are capable of recording whole paragraphs, according to Yaxue Cao, a writer who has been blogging about her experience on Twitter.

As reported by the New York Times, mainland Chinese users need to have enough technical know-how to circumvent the Great Firewall of China to use Twitter. That means conversations are more intimate, while also being more frank, than those on the government-monitored weibos. On Twitter, mainland Chinese Twitter users can interact with dissidents, including former student organizers who were exiled following the 1989 Tienanmen Square uprising.

"When one of them (@wurenhua) tweeted about his recent conversation with his 80-year-old mother over the phone and why the mother and son had avoided video chatting (so that they can hide sadness from each other), you get a glimpse of what this exile entails," Yaxue write on her blog.

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.

"In China, all the government decisions are done in a dark box," said Wen. "No one knows what's going on. There's never any legal reason cited. If these laws are passed in the U.S., every step of the way it will be more transparent. People can challenge it. There's no comparison when it comes to censorship in China and in the U.S."

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is delaying Tuesday's scheduled Senate vote on SOPA/PIPA. Reid still supports the anti-piracy bill, stating in a tweet that he does believe PROTECT IP raises "legitimate issues" regarding online counterfeiting and piracy.

China's History of Internet Censorship

China is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Analysts believe that China's economy could overtake the U.S. by 2019. It is also one of the most highly censored countries in terms of the Internet. Political censorship, also known as the "Great Firewall of China," is built into every layer of China's Internet infrastructure.

China blocked access to social networks Facebook and Twitter after Chinese hackers attempted to steal Google's company code and hack into Gmail accounts. Google shutdown many of its mainland China operations shortly thereafter, routing many of its users to Hong Kong.

Google returned to China nearly two years after the censorship battle.

The country currently has 500 million Internet users.

"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."

According to Want China Time:

"(He added) that he wants to learn from Chin Shih-chien, director of Taipei Zoo, regarding how animals should be managed. Gou not only invited Chin to take part in his company's annual review meeting but also asked all general managers in the group to listen to Chin's lecture... on how to manage different animals according to their individual temperaments."

Said another executive, "It's a tough job to manage a workforce of over one million, young people's hearts in China are hard to get hold of."

Especially when your aspiration is to eventually learn how to treat them as well as animals.

Gou photo by Dilma Roussef

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.

China Econtracker offers outlays of data based on gross domestic product, industrial value added, fixed asset investment, exports, imports, trade balance, foreign exchange reserves, consumer price index and bank credit.

It provides a source for each set of data and allows users to post the results to their Twitter account or Facebook page.

Whether your are among those likely to wind up "fighting it out with journalists at the State Council Information Office or getting lost for hours in the maze of Beijing's Internet" as Tom Orlik writes on China Real Time's post on the Econtracker, or just someone who wishes to be more informed about one of the most important economies on earth, the site looks to provide a real utility.

One commenter on the post, however, said:

"Chinese export statistics originate in individual customs declarations. These declarations include an ever expanding and now very likely statistically material amount of trade 'roundtripped' through Bonded Logistics Parks in China in order to realize export VAT refunds. One of the many reasons that this statistic, like any other in China, is simply not reliable."

Now, if you understand that enough to agree or disagree, you may not need this tool. For the rest of us, though, I still think it will prove useful, however reductive and unreliable statistical collections may be.

Government office photo by Daniel Gao | other sources: China Digital Times

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.

"On the one hand, microblogs can reflect the social situation and public opinion, and broadcast a positive public voice," Wang Chen, the minister in charge of the State Council Information Office, told Reuters "At the same time, microblogs... can make it easy to disseminate a few irrational voices, negative public opinion and harmful information."

The Chinese pilot programs require new weibo users to register their real names before they can post, and would eventually require existing users to register their real names as well. The sites have frequently been a source of information about government wrongdoing within China.

China has given no time frame of when it or even if it will open up to U.S.-based social networks, but the pilot program seems to favor a social network that already requires users to register with their real names. Twitter famously allows people to sign up anonymously, and Google+ was banned in China one day after it was launched last summer. But Facebook has tight rules on users registering its real name, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly planning another trip to China.

Despite the tight rules on free speech, which palso prohibit Internet users from saying anything negative about the ruling party, China remains the world's second biggest economy and a largely-untapped market for major U.S. tech companies. Last year, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told Time "it's impossible to think about connecting the whole world right now without also connecting China."

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.

Google's trouble in China all started in 2010, when it claimed that Chinese hackers had attempted to break into its services and committed malware attacks on Gmail accounts. Prior to that day, Google willingly censored its services at the government's request. But after tracing these attacks to China, and probably to official agents, Google said it was "no longer willing to continue censoring" its results.

China thought those allegations were "irresponsible." It led to some tough talk, but it took a while for Google to work up the courage to leave the mainland. The redirect to Hong Kong was an imperfect solution, since the government's filters caused frequent disruptions.

Changing Its Tune

Google's business is ads, and there are apparently just too many eyeballs in China for Google to give them up on principle. The WSJ reports that Google is working on commerce services and product search that will not require official censorship.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin grew up in the Soviet Union, and at the time of the censorship row, he told the WSJ that China's repression reminded him of that past. "I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism," Brin said, "and I find that personally quite troubling."

"Pragmatic" Reasons

But now, two years later, China has 500 million Internet users, more than twice as many as the U.S. As Google Asia executive Daniel Alegre told the WSJ, Google is changing its tune on China for "pragmatic" reasons.

Nearly 60% of Chinese smartphones run Android, but they don't have official Google services on board. That's a massive install base just lying there dormant, not even able to access the Android Market for apps. However, assuming Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility clears, Google will be making money on much of the hardware, anyway.

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)bout 300 employees at a plant belonging to Taiwan-based Foxconn... asked their boss for a raise. They were told either quit their positions with compensation or keep their jobs and receive no additional payment. Most employees took the first option, but the company terminated the agreement, and none of them were given the money they were promised."

Wuhan's mayor intervened to talk with the group and by 9 p.m. the next day, the group came down from the roof. The incident reportedly interrupted production of the Xbox 360.

Foxconn has been plagued by suicides, committed by employees working in terrible conditions.

UPDATED: New York Times reports a settlement. Kind of.

On January 12, the NYT wrote that Foxconn had "resolved" the pay dispute.

"In a statement released Thursday, Foxconn said most of the protesting workers had agreed to return to work after negotiations were held with the company and local government officials. But details of the agreement were not released. One of the workers said they had been promised additional compensation."

I'm not sure that being promised something by someone who already promised you something they didn't deliver is a resolution, exactly.

"One worker who participated in the Wuhan protest said by telephone that workers shifted to Wuhan had been promised about $450 a month in salary, including overtime pay, but that they had been given about a third less than that and that working conditions in Wuhan were much more difficult."

Foxconn photo by Liu Mao Yi

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.

Only 24% of U.S. users are content creators and 36% are conversationalists. Those numbers are quite similar in the EU, with 23% classified as "content creators" and 26% as "conversationalists."

In Asia, these numbers look drastically different. Seventy-five percent of online adults in metropolitan China and India create content, which includes publishing blogs and web pages, uploading video and audio/music they made and posting articles or stories that they wrote.

Japanese social media users do not follow the same patterns as Chinese and Indian social networkers. A mere 28% of Japanese users visit social networking sites at least once a month. Only 13% of online Japanese adults visit Facebook on a regular monthly basis. Instead, they prefer sites like mixi or Twitter, which fit their preference for online anonymity.

Emerging Social Mobile Markets: China and Africa

Another Forrester report proved that China and other Asia-Pacific countries led the pack in mobile adoption, including mobile social usage and work usage. They were also more likely to own multiple devices. This report showed that in metropolitan China, 33% accessed social networks via mobile, whereas only 25% of U.S. users and 11% of European users did the same. Forrester's report revealed that Chinese users accessed social sites the most, calling them "super connecteds."

This study does not include social network usage in Africa, which is only second to China. Toward the end of last year, Facebook partnered with French cell operator Orange to bring inexpensive cellphones armed with Facebook to Africa and Europe.

Facebook is available in 70 languages, and more than 75% of its users are located outside the U.S.

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.

This strictly Chinese system, according to a defense tech expert in today's Wall Street Journal, "could help the Chinese military to identify, track and strike U.S. ships in the region in the event of armed conflict." It has already been used to coordinate the movement of Chinese troops.

The network, called the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (BNSS), began transmitting yesterday, after 11 years of development. It consists of 10 satellites, with another six slated for deployment in the coming year. The BNSS is run by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, a state contractor serving the nation's space program and run by the Chinese military.

Since 2009, China has been very busy launching satellites, and learning from the successes and failures of those deployments. The BNSS is not believed to be as accurate as the GPS system, but it may, in time, get there. Bedou, which means Big Dipper in Mandarin, is only the first step toward a global system, called Compass, which is slated to have 35 functioning satellites around the world by 2020.

Like the GPS system, the BNSS would also make its data available for developers. Now, if you're uneasy with the notion of high-tech governmental scrutiny in an occasionally transparent, more-or-less representational democracy, imagine the kind of fun the government of China could have not just with a high-resolution, wide-coverage satellite network, but with that scifi scrutiny wired into a suite of ubiquitous consumer goods.

The only other GPS alternative is Russia's Glonass. The European Union is building its own, called Galileo, also scheduled to go live by 2020.

Sputnik graphic via Bruce Irving

Social Networking in China, Where Facebook is Banned

Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, yet users in the country number 530,520, according to data from SocialBakers. The number of users were expected to exceed 700,000 after Zuckerberg visited the country in December 2010.

October 2011 marked the seventh annual National Cyber Security Awareness Month. China vowed to its control over social media and instant messaging. Of course, there have been talks between Facebook and China, but China still employs strict, national-level censorship. Even if Facebook did enter the Chinese market, things would be tricky, reports Vator.tv.

"While embarking in the Chineses market would be an instant boost in the reach and usership numbers of Facebook, it could also result in negative publicity since entering the market would require censorship and other adjustments to the platform."

Currently, the top three social networks in China are Qzone, Renren and Pengyou. The Chinese social network, QZone, registered 505 million active users as of July 2011. RenRen claims 117 million registered users, but of that only 31 million are active, says BusinessInsider. Pengyou, which launched in December 2010, is China's third largest social network, with users numbering 101 million.

Where Russians Social Network: Odnoklassniki.ru and Vkontakte.ru

Russia's two biggest social networks, Odnoklassniki.ru and Vkontakte.ru account for the yellow dots on this map. Vkontakte.ru is the leading social network in Russia, and roughly translates as "In Contact" according to a post by RussianMarketer.com. As of June 2011, it claimed over 118 million user accounts and 99 million activated accounts. Odnoklassniki.ru, which is more like Classmates.com or FriendsReunited.co.uk, broke 100 million users this past June.

If The Japanese Have Gree, Mobage-Town, Mixi and Yahoo Mobage, Why Would They Bother With Facebook?

In Japan, Gree, Mobage-Town, Mixi and Yahoo Mobage are the biggest contending social networks.

Japanese social networks usually have a strong gaming element that attracts and connects its users. Facebook and Twitter are more about exchanging content and organizing information. In a study from 2010, researchers found that 75.4% of Japanese only accessed social networking sites from their mobile phone.

In March 2011, Facebook became the number six social network after Yahoo! Mobage, Gree, Mobage-Town, Mixi and Twitter. Mobage, which was launched October 1, 2010, passed the 3 million users in five months mark. Gree, Mobage-Town, Mixi and Twitter ranked high as well. This could be because of Facebook's emphasis on using real names, suggests SearchBlog.Asia.

"Japan has traditionally had a unique online culture where people tend to keep their privacy and feel insecure disclosing their personal information online. That is one reason why Facebook first struggled in the market as their rule is to have your real name posted. Mixi however allows users to use their nick name instead. Mixi also has a functionality whereby people can check who has visited their profile as people tend to like to know who has visited their page."

Interestingly, Mixi's features are similar to Facebook. Mixi Check is like Facebook's Share feature, and Mixi Check-In works like Facebook check-ins or Foursquare, tagging a user's physical location on the site. Still, Mixi encourages users to use nicknames on the site, yet on June 29, it changed the view of My Mixi (friends on Mixi) to include friends' full names in parenthesis under their nick names.

The full name is not necessarily a user's real name, like on Facebook. Anyone could use a pseudo name, if they felt so inclined. Still, this update made Mixi more similar to Facebook. Then, on September 1, Mixi launched Mixi Page, which are semi-public web pages for companies, shops and individuals who feel they need their own semi-public web pages. This is a lot like Facebook Pages, actually. On October 11, Mixi released an iPad app and Windows phone versions.

As of February 4, 2011, Mixi had 22.39 million users. In Japan, Facebook has only 2 million users.

Gree, a site that focuses primarily on mobile games, had 23.83 million users, snatching the top spot from Mixi in July 2010.

Mobage Town technically has 24.48 million users, but that's only if you sum up the original, mobile-only network Mobage Town and Yahoo Mobage, which recently launched a PC-based new network with Yahoo Japan.

Where Do South Korean Social Networks Stand?

South Korea is one of those countries that calls itself "democratic."

In South Korea, SK Communications runs the popular social networks Nate and Cyworld, which hold 35 million users total. Accounts on both those sites were compromised in July 2011, after an attack by Chinese hackers.

In December 2010, the newspaper Korea JoonGang Daily reported that the government would be cracking down on pro-North Korea Facebook entries.

"Spreading North Korean propaganda through social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter will be blocked starting next year, according to yesterday's Ministry of Justice briefing to President Lee Myung-bak on its 2011 policies."

In September 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent an open letter to the Korean Communications Standards Commission "condemning attempts to shut the public out of their work and urging them to embrace online freedom of expression." Here is a copy of that letter.

Research firm Forrester released a study last week showing global mobile usage trends. In almost every mobile usage aspect, metropolitan China and other Pacific Rim countries lead the way. That includes mobile social usage, work usage and multiple device ownership. Mobile is near an inflection point, changing the way people interact with information around the globe.

In metropolitan China, 46% of people access the mobile Internet, 57% listen to music, 36% play games on their mobile devices and about 33% access social networks. In contrast, near 25% of U.S. mobile consumers use their devices for social networking. Only 11% of European users have accessed social networks through their devices.

In terms of native applications, the United States is by far the biggest consumer of the application ecosystem. Near 90% of smartphone users in the U.S. have downloaded and app within the last three months. The United Kingdom ranked second in the survey with 66% with the next seven countries on the list all coming from the European Union. That would make comparative sense between the U.S./E.U. and the APAC countries. The use rates of the mobile Web (topped by 57% in Japan) are much higher than in the Western countries, which tend to use a lot more applications.

Overall, Forrester says that China has the higher incidence of what they call "super connecteds" - users that "access the Internet at least once a week from their phones and make use of advanced services and applications." See the graph below for more on Forrester's groups of users.

Forrester's report is based off a survey of 330,000 individuals across 18 countries focused on Europe, the United States and Asia Pacific. The report is the result of three surveys: The European, Asia Pacific and North American Technographics Benchmark Surveys.

Burma unblocks websites. The Burmese government unblocked international media sites as well as websites run by Burmese exiles.

Hong Kong bans online sharing of election information. Facebook, Twitter and other social media is now considered "political advertising" in Hong Kong, and therefore limited.

Syria blocks WordPress. In the midst of the protests in Syria, the government has blocked the blog host.

Cuban blogger arrested after Twittering. Luis Felipe Rojas was arrested in the town of Duaba after announcing his intent to take part in a protest for dead hunger strike activists.

Pakistan plans to block Google and YouTube. Pakistan has threatened Google and YouTube with blocking if they do not "help" the government with its alleged terrorism concerns.

Morocco arrests online activists. Blogger Mohamed Douas and others have been arrested in the midst of that country's pro-democracy protests.

International Code of Conduct for Information Security presented to the U.N. by cohort of anti-freedom governments. In a move of operatic Andy Kaufmanesque absurdity, China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan created and submitted a hilarious "code" for information security. (It's an anti-free speech, pro-tyranny document.)

Another lèse-majesté arrest in Thailand. Surapak Phuchaisaeng was arrested for posting pictures that were allegedly insulting to the monarchy. In reality, they were probably insulting to the ruling party.

South Korea censors Internet secretly. In Korea, even the censors are being censored.

Google re-licenses in China. So much for Google's brave stand against Chinese interference.

China fights cyberwar against exiled Tibetans. China's cyberwarfare soldiers are directing a constant stream of attacks against exiled Tibetans to keep them from speaking to each others, the public and coreligionists in Tibet.

Facebook to work with German government on code of conduct. Facebook has agreed to work with Germany on a "voluntary code of conduct" to protect the privacy of social network users.

Hourglass photo by William Andrus, Malaysia photo by Eric Teoh,

Voluntary attempts to conform to government demands while maintaining the freedom of speech found in their originating culture, have proven unsuccessful for companies like Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Yahoo, who have made the push into China and other rigidly-policed tech environments. The analysts say the problem is getting worse.

In the report, members of think tank SecDev Group come down hardest on search engines for bending to rules imposed on them in order to maintain the security of the Chinese state.

These practices include surveilling and monitoring Web use and acquiescing to demands to remove content that "offends" the sensibilities of the 450 million Chinese using the Web.

Here is a map from the report that shows the connectivity of control.

Google, the world's largest search engine, tried to put up a fight against the nanny tactics of China, but even that company renewed its license recently. It now operates its servers in Hong Kong and routes Chinese search traffic through them.

Reports like these have been coming out for many years. In 2005, for instance, Yahoo was taken to task for letting local subsidiary Alibaba turn over the name and email credentials of a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, after the government there demanded answers. Each new report gives the impression that Western companies must give away much of the cultural standards and ethical codes of conduct they practice in other parts of the world, as soon as they set up camp in authoritarian regimes.

Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN journalist and well-known free Internet advocate cautions that while the urge to slide into China is strong, social networking companies may not be doing this kind of thing just to obey Chinese rulers. The recent changes, she says, are likely just an attempt to mimic the success of Google+ Circles.

"Facebook does a lot of things that are not the best thing for free speech or dissent, because their success as a business is more important to the company than being a platform for free speech or political activism," she says. MacKinnon , who just wrote a book on Internet censorship called "Consent of the Networked", and has a Ted Talk about the topic featured at the book's site.

Facebook did not respond to a request for comment sent to their press department.

Map image of Asia connectivity comes from the SecDev Group report

The China mobile application market is characterized by confusion right now. Already-strong local players like Tencent have launched mobile app platforms to sell apps for Android and iOS. But those platforms depend on partnerships with companies in Europe and the United States.

Mobile Roadie is tearing up that formula. It's a Western company that's letting local developers make apps for themselves.

"Our hope is to bring some semblance of order to the chaos with legitimate high quality apps for major brands. We think that even though it is chaotic, higher quality is still desired by major brands and businesses," says Schneider.

The company is working with local provider Q-Mobao as well as the two largest mobile phone providers in the country, China Mobile and China Unicom, to implement the launch.

China boosts nearly 100 million smartphone service subscribers, and companies as diverse as Microsoft and Coca-Cola are entering into agreements to push out their product marketing to increasingly savvy and high-spending consumers in China's largest cities.

The platform integrates with YouTube, Brightcove, Flickr, Twitpic, Ustream, Topspin, Google News, RSS, Twitter, and Facebook while providing a service for brands and musicians to spread their messaging to the mobile market. Musicians, like Madonna, now have an app-based platform to spread their music and influence to the huge China audience.

Some of the bigger local mobile tech players in China have opened up their own app platforms, and there are several Android imitation apps that work on local and cheeaper versions of popular Western smartphones.

China Mobile, which does not even distribute the iPhone, says that it has seven million iPhones using its network at the present moment. The market is also flooded with knock-off iPhones sold for as little as $80.

You met someone and thought it would turn into a great relationship, only to be disappointed later on by the harsh reality that they just are not that into you. Well, for a few yuan (eight yuan roughly equals a dollar), you can hire someone to be the emissary for this hardest of all social missives.

According to this China blog, people calling themselves "break-up agents" are getting everything from stock trading software to enough money to buy a few iPads just to tell someone they don't know that someone else they don't know doesn't really want to know them anymore, "in that way."

Here's one example from the report: one of the guys that Shenzhen News interviews says that he got the idea from watching a Korean movie about the same kind of practice. On a recent sortie, he was paid about US$15 by a Chinese man to send a message of heartfelt breaking up to a young woman. When the break-up agent arrived at the door of the young woman, she handed him about $80 to do the same thing.

She said that it was she, not he, who wanted to do the breaking up.

The freelancing post sounds pretty lucrative, if not a little dangerous. Another source is quoted as saying that sometimes medical treatment is needed when the boyfriend receiving the message blames the bearer of the news.

Image courtesy of Lifehack.org