Microblogging in China in spreading the news quickly and discussing and evaluating government response. In 2012, there were 309 million people microblogging in China. "Wei boke" (微博客) and "weixing boke" (微型博客), commonly abbreviated as "weibo" (微博), are Chinese words for "microblog". A China-based microblogging service often names itself a weibo by putting it after the name of the service (e.g. Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo). A similar word "围脖" () is used as Internet slang for "weibo". Fanfou () is the earliest notable weibo service. It was launched in Beijing on May 12, 2007 by the co-founder of Xiaonei (now Renren) Wang Xing ().
Mass surveillance in China Weibo. At the beginning of 2018, Ma Huateng, chairman and CEO of Tencent, said that WeChat's MAU(monthly active users) across the globe reached a billion for the first time. Since Tencent has good cooperation with the central government to implement self-censorship and mass surveillance, it enjoys the dominance in China. Other messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, messenger, Line, etc, are mostly blocked or even forced out of the Chinese market. Chinese Internet users have several ways to circumvent censorship. Netizens generally rely on VPN, i.e.“Virtual Private Networks”, to get access to those blocked websites and messaging apps. However, in July