Twitter wants to do more than make their presence felt in China, they want to compete with Weibo.

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter said that they would love to have their presence felt in China. China is currently the world’s largest Internet market with more than 500 million users but many western mainstream websites including Google and Facebook are finding it hard to capture a market share since time immemorial.

China blocks overseas social networking properties like Facebook and Twitter, Google on the other hand is left to dust by Baidu, a Chinese search engine. Weibo is a micro-blogging platform similar to Twitter.

Dorsey stressed that for starters they must be allowed to compete with Weibo. That translates to unblocking Twitter on China. Dorsey made this statement during the All Things Digital AsiaD technology conference in Hong Kong.

Twitter and other websites like Google and Facebook are still accessible to China – through a proxy that is. China’s decision to block these non-local web properties is political in nature. Censorship in China is a serious matter that has been concerning freedom of expression lobbyist for the past few years.

Twitter has over 400 million users to date and it records more than 230 million Tweets per day.

Twitter has helped mobilize public opinion, included the recent series of uprisings in the Middle East which helped pave way for change in regimes. This according to opinions is what China is trying to avoid. Dorsey also said that is indeed what they want with twitter: to be a service that allows people to communicate without restrictions.

Weibo is currently being used by 30% of all internet users in China. It has features that cross Twitter and Facebook. The website that roughly translates to “microblogging” in China was launched in 2009.