Given that this is China — a place where anything “with Chinese characteristics” is big — it looks like the no-censors-included Twitter isn’t doing much to get the government’s attention — as in include tweets on a mainstream Chinese paper. Instead, what’s gracing papers such as the Beijing Evening News are tweets, if we may, from — Sina Microblog and Co. And it does appear that Hu and Wen want to tweet as well, but be assured — @HuJintao and @WenJiabao on Twitter are fakes.

Increasingly, folks are flocking to Sina Microblogs, amongst other microblogs, in China. Netease has a service, but apparently, it’s still very much an invite-only case, with those who even have an account limited in some respects from inviting others. (It’s a fair bit more restrictive of the Gmail or yesteryear.) QQ caused quite a stir some days ago, when it planned to launch its microblog — only to unexpectedly delay the launch. (Some said it was a ploy — to get 100 million users online at the same time.)

But then again, @zixia from Jiwai.de (which provided all the local tweeting at the Chinese Blogger Conference in Beijing in November 2007) may have had the last word. As one of the earliest local tweeps in the business, he’s of the opinion that, in this day and age, only those who are big and have good ties with the government in China can afford to let the tweeting continue. Startups and non-China-based tweeting machines, apparently, just won’t do.

最近開「微博」了沒? 中國大陸也逐步掀起一場「微博熱」，不過對於已經「被和諧」的推特等國外諸多微型博客服務來講，國內用戶很難上去，除非是「翻牆」過去。而與此同時，「牆內」則掀起了以新浪微博為「代表」的「境內微博浪」。前一段時間，嘰歪網的 @zixia 曾經在 Ignite 北京說道，現在如果你又「不大」又沒有與「主管機構」的「關係」的話，微博很難做大。