Here’s the thing about China: It’s very, very big. And although the Great Firewall cuts its citizens off from many popular U.S. web services, those citizens still exist. In fact, there are more of them than all the citizens of the United States and European Union combined. And they use social media and e-commerce just like the rest of us.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the companies serving the country’s 1.3 billion people with their social media, e-commerce and information-discovery needs are very, very big, too. Here are some statistics that demonstrate their scale.

Alibaba Group

Taobao, the eBay-like e-commerce line of business from Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group, does a lot of business. On a single day — Nov. 11, 2011 — the company did a whopping 19 billion Yuan (or approximately $3.05 billion) in sales. According to Alibaba Group CTO and Alibaba Cloud Computing President…