Opinion | How much can happen in a Chinese internet minute?
Sixty seconds – a recent report by Resonance China has found – is all it would take for 950,000 microblog posts to be published onto Sina Weibo
Much of mainland cyberspace may be blocked by a cumbersome great firewall, but that hasn’t hindered, in any way, the speed and quantity of what goes on a single digital minute there.
Unsurprisingly, Chinese netizens also take the lead as one of the world’s biggest online shoppers. At every minute, there are about 148,000 independent visitors shopping on Taobao Marketplace, one of the country's most popular online shopping portals. Jingdong Mall, another popular e-commerce destination, processes a whopping 486 deals per minute.
Electronic payment platform Alipay, which like Taobao, is owned by the Alibaba Group, processes 73,000 transactions in the same time, the report said.
It's not only homegrown companies that have been able to cash in on the internet boom. China is rapidly catching up in the realm of the mobile devices too - much of which is catered to by foreign software providers such as Apple, which the Chinese government once slammed for “unparalleled arrogance”.