The popularity of Twitter has produced a number of clones in China, just as there are Facebook clones. Some of China’s Twitter clones have been closed down by the Chinese government, but some have survived. We take a look at both cases in this post. We also assess Twitter’s chances of success in China, should it ever be freed from the ‘Great Firewall of China.’
Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were some of the first Twitter clones to become successful in China.
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However all three – plus Twitter itself – were …

A great article to further understand the growth of China – by Michael Elliott, International Editor for CNN
(Fortune Magazine) — What economic crisis? After a blip last winter, China is growing at more than 8% a year, and the scale and speed at which the country is building a modern infrastructure are mind-boggling.
But once you’ve absorbed the metrics — the size of its trade surplus, the thousands of miles of high-speed railways, the new ports and highways — a nagging question comes into focus: Sure, China can grow, but can …

Online travel service provider Ctrip.com has announced it has reorganized its vacation department to a travel and vacation department to further exploit the Chinese travel and vacation market.
Guo Dongjie, the vice president of Ctrip.com, said that the recently-promulgated “View on Accelerating Development of Tourism Industry” has greatly improved the status of the tourism industry in China and it has pointed out the direction for the future development of tourism enterprises. As the leader in the Chinese online travel sector, Ctrip.com will focus more on mass tourism while maintaining its competitive …

Competition between operators in the U.S. is driving down prices

By Joanne Lee-Young, Vancouver SunMarch 8, 2010There was much official fanfare when, after more than a decade of high-level wrangling, Canada got the nod for so-called approved destination status from China. That was a few months ago.
Now, while the actual bilateral agreement gets hammered out — line by arcane line, privately — B.C.-based tour operators are all a-chatter about how approved destination status (ADS) has played out in the U.S. and Australia, and what they would like to see in Canada’s …

According to the US Department of Commerce, a Chinese tourist spends an average of $6,000 USD in the United States. This enormous spending power of the Chinese tourist is the main reason behind the New York City Tourism Bureau to vigorously promote the visit of thousands of Chinese visitors; the largest group in NYC tourism history. According to the Tourism Bureau’s latest news, among the main activities of Chinese tourist, 95% are shopping, followed by dining. Business owners are all smiles upon the arrival of Chinese tourists.

Bloomingdales in NYC, a …

Vinay Dixit is the Senior Director of Asia Consumer Centers in McKinsey & Company and leads the Insights China by McKinsey service line. He joined McKinsey’s Shanghai office in February 2008 and has led several significant studies on Chinese consumers. His most recent publications include, “The coming of age: China’s new class of wealthy consumers” and “One Country, Many Markets – Targeting the Chinese consumer with McKinsey ClusterMap”.
The China Observer: You co-authored a report last year that found China will host the world’s fourth-largest number of wealthy households by 2015. …

Yahoo and Chinese Yahoo

Sex is definitely the universal theme for Chinese websites, from the major portals to small sites. It is very interesting to compare a US portal with a Chinese portal site to see the difference on this topic. It happens Yahoo is a good example for this since Yahoo has a Chinese Yahoo (Yahoo China) and it is comparable to other major Chinese portals, such as Sina.com.
There is no sex on the front page of Yahoo at all. You basically don’t see any ads or words related to …

Baidu.com:
Baidu (百度) is the Chinese Google. It dominates Chinese language search with about an 80% market share and is one of the biggest sites worldwide. As a local Chinese site it censors it’s search results. Like Google, Baidu offers a number of services apart from search, including Maps, documents, MP3 search, Baidu Space (a social network with over 100 million users) Baidu Encyclopedia, (China’s largest encyclopedia by users) and is launching a new video site called QiYi.com in March.
QQ.com
QQ is a portal that runs a number of services, most notably …

Social networks were once the domain of the young and tech-savvy. Not anymore, as Facebook reports a huge growth in older users last year. Also in China has the 35+ user base of doubled year over year.
Picture a social network user. Once upon a time it was easy – they were pimply teens huddled in messy bedrooms. Or young professionals organising their social lives. These days, however, they’re becoming far harder to categorise.
Last year Facebook reported huge growth in the 25 to 54 age group. After a feverish year of …

South Florida is starting to court the next big thing in tourism: visitors from China.
Broward and Palm Beach counties are working with state tourism agency Visit Florida to lure Chinese tourists, providing materials for travel trade shows in China and welcoming delegations of Chinese travel agents and press to help spread the word about what South Florida offers.
On a recent Friday, a group of eight Chinese travel writers visited Fort Lauderdale, taking a water taxi tour, shopping on Las Olas Boulevard, as well as sampling shrimp and steak at Shula’s …

Chinese tourists are seen at the Tokyo Disneyland on Feb 19. [Photo:China Daily]

The Chinese Lunar New Year is not only a gala for domestic retail sales, but a feast for overseas retailers, too.
Some 1,200 Chinese tourists celebrated the lunar New Year in New York between Feb 14 and 20, spending an estimated $6 million in the United States, said Zheng Wenqing, a public relations manager for New York Tourism Board’s China office.
Japanese retailers also reaped gains from Chinese tourists during the week. A local home appliance retailer, Bic Camera, reported …

Chinese online travel website company eLong Inc. reported its unaudited financial results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2009.
Total revenues at eLong.com for the fourth quarter increased 18% year-on-year to CNY106.9 million and net revenues increased 18% year-on-year to CNY100.9 million. Operating income in the fourth quarter was CNY2.4 million compared to operating loss of CNY10.3 million in the prior year period. Net income in the fourth quarter was CNY1.0 million compared to net loss of CNY8.2 million in the prior year period.
Total revenues in 2009 …

China’s position in the tourism development in the world has been rising, the fourth largest entry receiving country in the world and the largest exit tourist source country in Asia. From 2000 to 2008, the total revenues of Chinese tourism increased by 12.5% annually (by CNY). In 2008, China totally received tourists about 1.89 billion man-time, rising by 5.9% of last year, realizing the tourism revenues of 1.16 trillion CNY ?166 billion USD?, increased by 5.8% of last year.
The slowdown of economy growth negatively affected the tourism, leading to the …

We’re sure that by now, we don’t need to tell you how important social media is. What we do need to tell you is that Chinese social media is more important than you think.
If you’re in an industry that markets to the Chinese; whether it’s consumers, tourists, business to business or the public sector, you could be missing out on a huge potential audience.
Here are our top 10 reasons for embracing Chinese social media:
1) China has about 400 million internet users. Never mind all the Chinese speakers that live in other countries.
2) …

Twitter and Google are helping to end China’s stranglehold on information and accelerate the process of democratisation
Google has been widely celebrated for its loud refusal to continue censoring its search results in China. It is still unclear whether Google will continue to operate in China (note: Google is hiring in China), but in any event we are not about to see much change in China’s internet policy. More likely, all this “foreign meddling” will merely cause the Chinese government to dig in its heels.
Even if Google does ultimately leave China, the …

The state-owned newspaper The Global Times has run a particularly open article about the extensive controls on the internet within China and their effect on users and Internet companies. If you’re pressed for time to read the whole thing, DigiCha posts some choice quotes.

Douban, a Chinese social networking service website, received $10 million in venture capital from its second round of fundraising on January 25, after raising $2 million in 2006. Photo: CFP
He couldn’t take it anymore.
When Hong Kong writer and poet Liao Weitang found his online photo album had …

Preference Of Wealthy Mainland Tourists For Upscale Malls, Luxury Outlets Hits Department Stores Hard
Chinese luxury shoppers typically prefer upscale shopping malls to all-in-one department stores, as Shanghai’s Plaza 66 attests (Image via Flickr)

Last week, Jing Daily translated an article about Chinese tourists outspending Japanese 2-to-1 at a number of famous South Korean department stores. According to that article, visitors from mainland China now account for more sales than ever at some of Seoul’s most fashionable and expensive stores, and it’s not unknown for one-day tourists to drop hundreds of thousands …

China’s Internet has seen rapid progress in both technology and expansion of users since it officially gained connection to the international network 16 years ago. Following are the key facts about China’s Internet development:
In April 1994, China achieved its full-functional connection to the Internet by opening a 64 kbps international dedicated line to the Internet, and was then officially recognized as a country with full functional Internet accessibility.
In May of the same year, China’s first web server and the first set of web pages were launched by a research institute under Chinese …

Cissy Ding says she finally gave in at the start of the year and joined China’s social networking bandwagon, setting up an account on local micro-blogging service Weibo.
“If I hadn’t gotten started, I would have felt totally lame, and out of touch,” says Ding, an editor at a women’s magazine.
China’s domestic social media sites like Weibo are booming thanks to their better knowledge of the world’s largest Internet market — and the censorship stifling foreign rivals like Facebook, Twitter, and Google-owned YouTube.
The 384 million people now online in China, where …

Social media remains the hot topic of the digital world and I often get asked about the various statistics involved. This in itself is fairly difficult, as this particular online sphere is constantly shifting, evolving and growing at an astronomical rate.
Bear in mind that these are relatively recent figures – in a few months time (or even less) a lot of it is likely to be obsolete –  but for now, I think they’re a great way of demonstrating the impact that social media is having in the digital …