China's Facebook Few–14,000 and Falling
The number of Facebook users in China is dwindling. Or to be more exact: falling off a cliff. And not by choice, as anyone who has tried to access Facebook in China recently knows.
It’s no secret among people in the Internet business in China that Facebook was interested in the world’s largest Internet user population. But apparently–according to various parties that met with a delegation of Facebook officials some time in the last few years–they came, they saw, and they left Chinese social networking Web sites like Renren.com (formerly known as Xiaonei), Kaixin001 and 51.com to fight amongst themselves for the market.
Then, to the chagrin of both expatriate and Chinese users (the number of which appeared for a time to be growing), China’s censors blocked Facebook. Blocks of overseas Web sites such as YouTube.com are a fact of life here, barely acknowledged and never explained by the government. (Many of these sites actually matter very little to Chinese Internet users who have their own favorite Web sites to watch videos on.)
