Expats are forever griping about China's strict internet policies and censoring of social media sites, but the Chinese internet has a crop of websites that rival Facebook, MSN, YouTube, and eBay. Here are eleven of the most popular:

Photo: infzm.com

1) Taobao.com  
The big daddy of Chinese e-commerce, Taobao is China's answer to eBay, and the most popular retail site on the mainland. It is owned by the Alibaba group and has 190 million registered users who bid on items or buy them directly from sellers using a special escrow service called Alipay. Taobao sells a huge range of items from mosquito nets to mountain bikes, and the Wangwang chat service allows users to discuss products and prices. Taobao is completely in Chinese, but downloading Google's translation toolbar will allow non-speakers to get in on the action. Alternatively, ask a Chinese friend to help you find your way around.

2) Kaixin001
The Chinese government shut down many Western social networking sites in the aftermath of the Xinjiang riots in the summer of 2009. This allowed home-grown websites to flourish, including Kaixin001. Appealing especially to office workers in top tier cities, Kaixin001 attracts 3.5 million users a week, and is the 13th most popular website in China. It is well known for its annoyingly addictive games such as Happy Farm and Sell Your Friends, which have made it onto Facebook. One blog commenter wrote: "Kaixin001 games are the top ways young Chinese white collar workers make themselves look busy behind their computer screens".

3) 51.com
Another social networking leviathan, 51.com gets a massive 14 million unique visits per week. It was founded in 2005, and is the largest social networking site in China. It allows users to upload blogs and photos to their profiles, and as many as three million blog posts are made each day. With 120 million registered users, 51.com is the networking site of the masses, used mainly in second and third tier cities across China.

4) Renren.com
Social networking site Renren.com started life as Xiaonei.com in 2005. Aimed at university students, it was a shameless rip-off of Facebook, copying the font, color, and layout. It was founded by Wang Xing, who also launched the Twitter clone Fanfou. Xiaonei launched a WAP mobile version in 2008, and changed its name to Renren the following year. Its "desktop" instant messaging services is a popular feature, and the site has 40 million registered users.

5) Douban.com
Its name means "watercress", but Douban has nothing to do with vegetables. It's a Web 2.0 net community on which users discuss and recommend books, films, music, fashion, and other topics. It is one of China's largest online communities, with 10 million registered users. Censors keep a close eye on Douban, and are quick to ban volatile keywords and topics. The blocking of images featuring Renaissance paintings in March 2009 prompted the "Portraits: Dress Up" movement, in which users were asked to design cover-ups for nude figures.

6) Youku.com  
Youku is a video hosting site along the lines of YouTube, but trumps its Western rival by showing full-length episodes instead of 10 minute portions. Youku started life in 2006 as a repository for user-generated video content. It was founded by Victor Koo, ex-president of search engine giant Sohu.com, and moved swiftly towards partnering with 1,500 television companies and distributors to gain access to full episodes of shows and series. Youku rakes in 200 million RMB per year gross, and is massively popular. In October 2009, viewers spent a total of 229 million hours on it. A team of full-time reviewers scans all incoming content for pornography and other objectionable stuff.

7) Tudou.com  
Another popular Chinese website with a vegetable name, Tudou is another video sharing site. It was founded in 2005 by Gary Wang and Marc van den Chijs who were colleagues at Bertelsmann Media Group. Thanks to the longer duration of its film clips, Tudou pips YouTube to the post when it comes to bandwidth, using one petabyte per day (we'd never even heard of petabytes until now, so they must be big). In September 2008, Tudou added an HD function called Hei Dou (hd.tudou.com), or "black bean".

8) Baidu.com
Baidu, the Chinese version of Google, has a romantic story behind its name. The words "bai du" (百度) meaning "a hundred times" appear in the Song Dynasty poem "Green Jade Table in the Lantern Festival" by Xin Qiji, in which a girl looks back hundreds of times for her lost lover. Romance aside, Baidu is one of China's most popular search engines, and has the same iconic status as Google. It was founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, and was the first Chinese company to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index. As a search engine, it lists 740 million webpages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. It also offers 57 additional services, including the Wikipedia-esque Baidu Baike.

9) QQ.com
The site that's responsible for those ubiquitous "bi-bi-bi-bi" trills that can make office life hell, QQ is the most popular instant messaging platform on mainland China. Part of Tencent.com, it is the Chinese equivalent of MSN Messenger or AIM. Launched in 1999, QQ was originally called ICQ ("I seek you" - get it?) and currently has over 300 million users. You can now access ringtones and games as well as chatting, and there is even an English-language "international" version – imqq.com.

10) Sina.com.cn
The largest "infotainment" web portal in China, Sina is based in Shanghai and offers users an array of news stories, showbiz gossip, photographs, and forums. Guangzhou newspaper Southern Weekend crowned it Chinese Language Media of the Year in 2003. Sina has a large following in North American Chinese communities, and receives a staggering three billion page views per day.

11) 163.com
The 163.com domain belongs to the large-scale internet company NetEase, and is one of the most popular "infotainment" web portals in China. It came 28th in the Alexa rankings in April 2010, beating Western giants AOL, BBC, and ESPN in page views. It was founded in 1997, and owes much of its fame to Massive Multi-player Online Gaming (MMPORG), including the popular Westward Journey game.

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