CNet has and interesting article about the brands that are seen as hot (to own or work for) in China, based on the views of their China staff. Many of the views emphasise how the flat the world has become. The list of big brands and the views about them could come from anywhere: Sony (nice but expensive), Apple (love the iPod), Microsoft (hate the company, use the MSN), Dell (used to be good, but now service poor and what about those batteries), IBM (boring).
In fact, it was the few differences that were reported that made the article more interesting. YouTube, not a great success, it is not in Chinese, and there are plenty of video sites. Yahoo is marginal and Google has a much smaller share – one of the reasons is the strength of Baidu (Wikipedia link here). Baidu is a China based search engine, which is particularly strong at searching MP3 files. I checked on Alexa and Baidu is ranked 7th globally, the highest non-US site, one behine MySpace and two ahead of Wikipedia.