I was in Shanghai a few months ago for a Black Card Circle charity event. After being on a 20-hour flight with no Wi-Fi, I was feeling Twitter withdrawal symptoms. The first thing I wanted to do when I got to my hotel room was get on Twitter. I looked like a real geek on that trip because I only took a backpack with a toothbrush, a fancy dress and my gadgets. My power cords took up more space than anything else in my bag. When I got to my room, I booted up my laptop and immediately went to Twitter. Nothing. I tried again. Nothing.
After gasping for air upon realizing I couldn’t tweet, I suddenly remembered the articles I’d read before about how Twitter is blocked in China. I remembered reading that if Facebook and Twitter were allowed in China, it would change the entire complexion of social media as we know it. I also remember seeing people tweet from there before. I very quickly figured out that a few sites go around the nation’s firewall to allow tweeting, but overall, people in China don’t have access to Twitter.
However, don’t for one-second think that means people in China don’t know what microblogging is. As a matter of fact, there are several Twitter-like sites that they use. The most popular one (with 58% of microblogging users and 30% of the entire population of Internet users) is Sina Weibo. According to this article on Telegraph, Tom Cruise, Bill Gates, Emma Watson and Maria Sharapova are all users on the site and are building up tons of followers. It is set up the same way as Twitter, even down to the @ and the 140 characters.
According to The Next Web, Sina Weibo is more popular in China than Twitter is in the States. In an effort to increase International users, in June Sina Weibo announced via Reuters that they plan to release an English version by the end of the year. Who has the most followers on Sina Weibo? It’s a Chinese actress named Yao Chen who has over 10 million. In case you are wondering, “Weibo” is Chinese for “microblogging” and Sina is the name of the corporation (SINA Corporation) which launched the service in 2009.
Back to the point of this article… Do you want to know what is trending on Sina Weibo at the moment? It’s a television show called Beauty Class, which teaches Chinese women “how to be perfect.” This is a copy of the original tweet (translated to English):
Based on the video which you can watch on China Smack (hey, give me a break, I couldn’t figure out how to translate the embed code to English) and based on these pictures below, I suppose “being perfect” means having big boobs, rubbing our bodies and wearing hardly any clothes. This was originally tweeted 2 days ago, and in the first 24 hours, it had over 58,000 RTs and 13,000 comments. It is currently at the top of the trending topics list. Hmm… I suppose American women aren’t the only ones with self-esteem and image issues after all.
Via: [Oddity Central]
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