According to the U.S. Census Bureau and the UN the world population stands at almost exactly 7 billion human beings and according to ICT Facts and Figures more than a third of us are now connected to the Internet. And according to a study conducted by the folks over at Royal Pingdom there are almost 8 people joining the Web every second. Looking at the chart they provided that I've posted here, you can see that means over 683,000 people become new Web users every day. And half of that number speak Chinese.

One of the most amazing statistics I found on the Internet World Stats Website is the fact that in the year 2000 there was an estimated 114 million people on-line in Asia and about 108 million people on the Internet in North America (i.e. U.S., Canada and Mexico) but by 2011 while North American Internet usership climbed to 273 million, Asian Internet useres soared to over a billion. What's more in Asia there's plenty of room for growth since only 26 percent of their population is on-line while over 78 percent of North Americans are on-line.

Clearly, the future of the Internet will have a decidedly Asian flavor. In the very near future there will be many millions more Chinese speaking Internet users than all of the other languages combined.

Another reason that China will dominate the Internet in the future is that Chinese orthography is perfectly suited to the Twitter Age. As a perfect example of what I mean, consider the following statement:

The above statement was posted using Chinese characters on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter equivalent, on the 12 of this month by Mao Maozi, a cameraman with the state-run Shanghai Education Television network. Like Twitter, Sina Weibo has a 140-character count limit. So Mr. Maozi's statement cited above is all one Tweet! One can express a lot of thought very concisely in Chinese.

Back in July of 2011, I put up a story on this site about Websites Blocked by the Great Firewall of China in which I stated that according to Internet World Stats there were 477 million Internet users in China. As of December 31st, according to The Los Angles Times, that number has climbed to 513 million. That's 36 million in 6 month's time!

And China has managed this phenomenal growth without Facebook, Twitter or Google all of which are band or blocked by the Chinese government. China's citizens rely on the search engine giant Baidu (BY-doo) instead of Google and as I mentioned previously Sina Weibo is the Chinese equivalent of Twitter while Renren is the Chinese Facebook.

Eric X. Li is a highly successful venture capitalist from Shanghai who is either a member or is very closely associated with the Chinese Communist Party. A few days ago (February 16, 2012) Mr. Li published a very startling piece in The New York Times entitled Why China’s Political Model Is Superior in which he expresses a world view that most of us in the West, including myself, find a lot to disagree with. However, I recommend everyone read Mr. Li's NY Times opinion piece because I have no doubt that close to one billion Chinese people agree with everything he has to say.

I bring up this NY Times article by Mr. Li as a means of introducing to him so that we can better understand where he's coming from when we read the article he published a month ago (1/20/12) on The Huffington Post called Globalization 2.0: China's Parallel Internet in which Eric X. Li gives us a glimpse at how a great many if not most intelligent and well-informed Chinese people view the Internet and their government's regulation of it.

While I understand Mr. Li's position in regard to government regulation of the Internet in Mainland China, I feel confident that 99% of us here in the West would never allow our governments to exercise any control whatsoever over our access to any part of the Internet.

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