Chinas 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 worlds most populous country from getting into social networking. Some 500 million Chinese citizens are online and a quarter of the worlds 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 Facebooks void. Sina Weibo is the microblog of choice in Twitters 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 Chinas answer to social networking. Of the countrys 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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