Worldwide, the number of websites grew by 21.4 million to a total of 255 million, according to Royal Pingdom ^[1]. But China is bucking the trend. The country lost 1.3 million websites ^[2] in 2010, reducing its total website count by 41 percent, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The country has long routinely blocked websites it considers harmful, such as the Chinese-language BBC, Facebook, and Twitter, part of a set of controls that critics call “The Great Firewall of China.” The country launched a crackdown on pornography in 2009, and blacked out all news reports that Chinese citizen Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize ^[3] last year while serving an 11 year term for “subversion” in a Chinese jail.

None of this, however, had anything to do with the dwindling number of Chinese websites, according to Liu Ruisheng, researcher at the Academy. He added that while the number of sites declined, the number of pages increased 79 percent last year.

He told the BBC ^[2] that China has “a high level of freedom of online speech.”

Read more on the BBC ^[2].