A Chongqing citizen reads about the "BaiGooHoo"website, a popular "Shanzhai" website at present.[China Daily]

How many Kaixin websites, a Chinese copycat Facebook and a buzzword for millions of Chinese office workers, exist in cyberspace?

The answer is "beyond calculation". Google kaixin in Chinese, and numerous websites pop up, with kaixin part of their domain names, like kaixinwang.com, 52kaixin.com, kaixinwang.org.

In these worlds of kaixin (literally "joyful"), it's not easy for the original edition, Kaixin001.com, to feel joyful.

Kaixin001.com entered the market in 2008, when social networking sites were already flourishing in China. But it quickly won white collars' hearts by a lot of easy-to-play games, which helped it soar in the Alexa rankings, a widely accepted system based on the sites' visitor numbers.

As the fame of Kaixin001.com soared, its copycats mushroomed. But the most threatening one didn't come until October 14 when ChinaInterActiveCorp, its biggest rival, bought the domain name Kaixin.com and put it in test operation.

As the owner of Xiaonei.com, the most popular social networking site among college students, ChinaInterActiveCorp has long coveted Kaixin001's white-collar market, as its ambitious expansion in white-collar market had not been very successful.

"At first, I suggested registering Kaixin007," Chen Yizhou, CEO of ChinaInterActiveCorp, recalled when interviewed by Hexun.com. "But we soon found that a set of domain names, from Kaixin001 to Kaixin100 had been registered."

"We had to buy one in any case, so we decided to buy a good one," said Chen, who reportedly bought Kaixin.com at a high, undisclosed cost.

Netizens found that not only did Kaixin.com share a very similar name with Kaixin001.com, but also eight out of its 12 functions were exact clones of Kaixin001.com.

Kaixin.com soon was mocked by netizens as a shanzhai edition of Kaixin001.com. The word shanzhai, literally meaning "remote village" in Cantonese, became a popular name for fakes when shanzhai cell phones, churned out by small-scale manufacturers in southern China, quickly seized a considerable chunk of the mainland market during the past two years. The slang now refers to anything that steals ideas or styles from already well-known products, personalities or concepts.

However, Chen didn't seem to care at all. He dispersed all the doubts and criticism by saying "if you say it is a shanzhai edition, then baidu.com is also a shanzhai edition." (Baidu.com is China's most popular search engine and bears a distinct resemblance to google.com.)

"(Kaixin001) didn't buy Kaixin.com, which demonstrated they are not serious enough," Chen added, "If we don't buy it, someone else will buy it. If you are not serious enough, the market will deliver the consequences."

At its launch, domain name experts criticized Kaixin001.com because kaixin001 didn't exactly correspond with its Chinese name and its Chinese name was not registered as a trademark.

Thanks to its well-known name, Kaixin.com climbed the Alexa ranking board at a surprising speed, from far behind 10,000 to currently around 1,200. And Kaixin001.com hasn't filed any IP infringement lawsuit against ChinaInterActiveCorp, and has refused to comment on the issue.

Ironically, Xiaonei.com didn't escape from the copycat syndrome, either. A site called Xiaonei001.com jumped out, imitating Xiaonei.com exactly as Xiaonei.com imitated Kaixin001.com.

The shanzhai virus expanded beyond social networking sites, as both baidu and google have also been affected.

Log into Baigle.com, type in a word, and you will get two search results in the same page, one from baidu, the other from google. Creative? Try baigoohoo.com to get three results simultaneously from baidu, google and yahoo.

Even government websites have been affected. In mid December, a fake edition of a branch of the central government's website shocked some netizens with a domain name and homepage exactly resembling the authentic one. Following a warning from the real deal, the fake was shut down.