Okkie, so what’s all the censorship about?

The Chinese State Council Information Office today released the China Internet White Paper which focused more on the fact that the over 200 million blogs in China post over 3 million new entries every single day rather than on the dark side of the Web some of us know off by heart — the Great Firewall. In news summaries from especially the Beijing Evening News, not a word was mentioned about censorship. Instead, the White Paper mentioned that Chinese citizens have the constitutional freedom of speech, a freedom that, if you’re aware of the acute limits in the political sphere, is clipped with amazing speed and frequency.

Having, so to speak in Chinese Netspeak, “done a bit of propaganda for the Western reactionaries” (who apparently care more about foursquare going down than anything else as of late), here are some stats to follow…

• Over 80% of sites offer some form of interaction (a BBS, or something, to start things off with).

• There are over a million forums and 220 million blogs hostead in China.
• Over 66% of Netizens in China post or comment. (What’s this thing about the “silent majority”, then?)
• Over 50% of “big firms” do e-commerce (the figure’s 30% for SMEs).
• Over 100 million buy things through the Web.
• CNY 3.6 trillion — that’s the sum of all e-commerce done through the Chinese interwebs.
• In 2008, the Chinese Internet industry had a value of CNY 650 billion.
• That sum alone is 10% of worldwide figures or 1/60th that of Chinese GDP.

As usual, given from where those figures “came from”, take them with a healthy grain of salt.