Joe Lamantia.com

A post­ing from China Web2.0 Review shared results of a report on Chi­nese tag­ging rates released by Baidu, China’s lead­ing search engine.
I was not able to locate a trans­la­tion of the orig­i­nal report from Baidu, so I’ll quote the sum­mary from China Web2.0 Review:

Accord­ing to the report, only 2.3% of inter­net users have ever used tag, they mainly use tags in social book­mark­ing and blogs. I don’t know the meth­ods of data col­lec­tion, but the report said about 15 mil­lion Chi­nese web­pages were book­marked by users, on aver­age each user has saved 40 online book­marks. Among them, over 90% users add less than two tags for a book­mark.
And based on the tags of user saved book­marks, the most used tags are “soft­ware down­load”, “BBS”, “enter­tain­ment”, “game” and “learn­ing”.
We don’t know which ser­vices are included for analy­sis in the report, so I have no idea to which extent I can trust it. But based on my obser­va­tion, I agree with the basic find­ing of the report, even though more and more ser­vices have embod­ied tag­ging fea­ture, only a very small part of early-adopters in China indeed use it.
Two things come to mind right away:

1. The matu­rity, struc­ture, and usage pat­terns of the Inter­net in China are not directly com­pa­ra­ble to the matu­rity matu­rity, struc­ture, and usage pat­terns of the Inter­net else­where (largely due to sub­stan­tial restric­tions and cen­sor­ship by the Chi­nese government)
2. Offi­cial Chinse posi­tions are not fully reli­able, and so the num­bers, con­text, and usage described could be very dif­fer­ent from real practices

Still, even with the absence of solid qual­i­fy­ing, cor­rob­o­rat­ing, or con­tex­tual infor­ma­tion, this rate of adop­tion for tag­ging seems con­sis­tent with the rest of the very rapid pace of mod­ern­iza­tion in China.
And as the First Prin­ci­ple of Tag Clouds — “Where there’s tags, there’s a tag cloud” — says, this means there are quite a few tag clouds on the way in China.