Frustrated Chinese bloggers greet Twitter’s successful IPO with satire

When Twitter’s successful IPO made newspaper headlines all over China on Friday, many said they were shocked by the exceptional performance of a website that “never existed” in their world.

On Thursday, the California-based microblogging service saw its stock price soar from an initial public offering price of US$26 to US$44.90, a 73 percent increase. It sold 70 million shares and raised US$24 billion as investors paid a premium for the stock’s promise of fast growth.

The attention it garnered in the heavily-censored Chinese media sparked a mixed reaction online, ranging from admiration to sarcasm.

“A website that we can’t even open is now worth US$24 billion? It’s a crazy world we are living in!” wrote one microblogger.

“Twitter is like a ghost, because you’ve only heard about it, but no one has ever seen it,” wrote another.

“This is the moment when you realise that China is so apart from the rest of the world,” wrote a New York-based blogger with half a million followers.

That post was commented more than 3000 times in the hours after it was published, with many commentators saying they had found China’s Sina Weibo easier to use than Twitter.