Paid Search Engines in China:
Baidu 63% market share
Google China 27% market share
Yahoo China 6% market share
Sogou 1% market share
Others 2% market share

About China:
Known for the most part of the 20th Century as the “sleeping giant,” China finally freed itself from years of political turmoil and international seclusion to re-emerge as one of the world’s major economic and political powers of the 21st Century.
After World War II, China experienced civil strife and was taken over by the Communist Party under chairman Mao-Zedong, who laid the ground for the transformation of the country from a largely semi-feudal and agricultural society to a modern, industrialized socialist state.
After Mao’s death in 1978, the new party leadership under Deng Xiaoping revised the former leader’s highly autocratic policies, crafted new economic policies favoring free market, and reopened China to international trade. Since then, there was no looking back for China.
ToFrom a GDP of $188.2 billion in 1980, China’s Gross Domestic Product has leaped to $8.79 trillion in 2009, the world’s third largest after the European Union and the United States. In a span of 30 years, from 1980 to 2009, China posted an average GDP growth rate of 10 percent annually.
But despite its enormous wealth as a nation, China, the world’s largest country in land area and the most populous, has a measly per capita of $6,600, an annual income that is relatively low by world standards. While wealthy Chinese businessmen are making a killing from China’s resurgent economy, ordinary workers are hardly making enough to be called lower middle income earners.
Immense disparity in wealth distribution is fomenting social unrest among workers affected by stringent policies of the ruling Communist Party. Efforts by the Chinese government to promote GDP infringe on people’s economic and political rights, including arbitrary land acquisition, suppression of labor unions, long hours and unsafe working conditions, and internet censorship.
The Chinese government also faces economic development challenges from other fronts, notably reducing high domestic savings rate to encourage domestic consumption, sustaining adequate job growth, reducing corruption and other economic crimes, and safeguarding the environment.
China’s ability to rise above these challenges appears unquestioned at this time as leaders continue to bank on past year’s successes to silence critics. So far, China has shown remarkable resilience in the face of global recession by posting near double-digit GDP growth figures, while keeping factories humming and workers busy.
But there are steady calls for a shift from the present model to a new economic approach that encourages a more equitable geographical distribution of growth and development. So far, economic development has been more rapid in coastal provinces than inland areas, causing about 200 million laborers and their dependents from central provinces to relocate to coastal cities. While everyone agrees on the need for change, top leaders continue to debate on the timing and method of transition, with influential businessmen apparently stalling talks.
China’s rapid growth has likewise affected the environment in the form of air pollution, soil erosion, and steady fall of the water table, particularly in the north. In the light of international pressure, China announced that by 2010 it would decrease energy intensity by 20 percent from 2005 levels. Like the rest of the world, the Chinese government seeks to discover and use new alternative sources of fuel, including nuclear energy.
Reformists within the Communist party system have found a new argument against the present export-oriented economic policy when the global economic downturn reduced foreign demand for Chinese exports for the first time in many years.
More frequent and deadlier natural disasters attributed to climate change have also been making an impact on the lives of the people in the form of storms, floods, and droughts. North, southwest, and central China are experiencing an increasing number of droughts, while the financial center of Pudong, a pricey piece of reclaimed property in Shanghai, is in danger of sinking because of rising sea water levels.
For some party reformists, these are real issues that China’s policy makers have to urgently address without raising economic achievements as argument to stall timely economic reforms.