BEIJING—On Nanluoguxiang Hutong, a crowded alley near the Forbidden City, 26-year-old Lin Jian sits in a café sipping monkey-picked tea. Lin, wearing a T-shirt, black jeans, a trench coat, and sandals, is riveted by the image on his laptop screen. “Oh my god,” he says to a friend. “Look at the news from America.”

Just as he does every morning, the software engineer is poring over a list of articles and feeds on Zhuaxia, China’s most popular personal reading and sharing portal. He grabs his friend’s shoulder and jerks him close to his computer screen. “I bet you cannot imagine the newest trend among American celebrities,” Lin exclaims. “They no longer wear their underwear, and of this they are proud.” To prove the point, he shows his friend a photograph of Britney Spears.

In the West, RSS readers are useful. In China—even when feeding users information about undergarments (or lack thereof)—they are revolutionary. Lin uses Zhuaxia to track foreign and domestic news, as well as to read blogs about a wide range of issues, from U.S.-China trade to global warming. “It’s indispensable to my life,” Lin says. “In America, you have the New York Times. We don’t. I rely on Zhuaxia to understand the world.”

The first wave of Chinese technology pioneers built a stable internet infrastructure. Now the Web 2.0 revolution is expanding it's reach and usefulness. Instead of the hundred flowers Chairman Mao famously called upon to bloom, interpreted as a call for the free expression of political opposition to replace the Chinese government’s policy of suppressing dissent, there are hundreds of startups. Many of the hot new Chinese companies are modeled after U.S. icons: 6rooms.com is the YouTube of China, Dangdang is a Chinese Amazon, and KooXoo is a Craigslist. Generally, the Chinese companies are sophisticated knockoffs with some impressive additional features. KooXoo, for instance, allows you to isolate your search—for an apartment or a “used bed lumpy but successful”—to any area in any Chinese city on a 3-D map. But there’s nothing in the U.S. quite like Zhuaxia—a central place for people to get information about domestic matters or world politics or pop singers.

Zhuaxia was founded in 2006 by Xu Yirong, 31, and Chen Zhenyu, 30, who met in Beijing when Xu returned from a stint at the I.B.M. Almaden Research Laboratory in California after earning a master’s in computer science at Stanford. Chen was already back in China working at Baidu, the enormously popular Chinese search engine, which he joined after receiving an advanced computer science degree at U.C.L.A. “We are part of the generation of students educated in the U.S. who returned to China to seek our fortune in the new Wild West and contribute to the blossoming of the Chinese people,” Xu says.

Blossoming is an understatement. A recent report by the Chinese Internet Network Information Center predicts that by 2009, more people will be online in China than in any other country. The nation’s coming dominance of the internet is no small milestone considering that a few years ago most of the population didn’t have indoor plumbing. Of course, hundreds of millions of Chinese are still impoverished, but there’s a burgeoning middle class. One hundred and thirty million individuals in China—about 10 percent of the population—are already online. Half a billion have cell phones. The communications explosion is a radical proposition in China, because a short time ago free-flowing—even relatively free-flowing—information was unthinkable.

Still, it’s no free-for-all. The Chinese government has a love-hate relationship with the internet and heavily censors what can be viewed. “Our government is in a quandary,” says Xu Bing, associate professor of computer science at Beijing University. “The technology is essential to modernization, but it allows unprecedented communication and access to information in a place where communication has been restricted and information tightly controlled.”

There’s an electronic barrier to the World Wide Web beyond China’s borders—what locals call the Great Firewall. “Some sites will be blocked temporarily,” according to Tangos Chan, who runs China Web 2.0 Review, an English-language blog that covers the development of the Web. “But there are some sites that will be blocked for a long time, such as Wikipedia. Of course, some sites will be accessible suddenly. Currently, some blogging service providers, such as Wordpress.com, are blocked in China.”

Zhuaxia has not been subject to government interference because, the founders claim, their technology is “neutral.” Users choose the news, feeds, and other information they want, and Zhuaxia’s software—spiders and aggregators—scoop it up. Hence, the company’s name, which means “catching the shrimp.” Says Xu Yirong, “It’s like a net in the ocean gathering tons of tasty shrimp.” And the name has a double meaning: The characters are pronounced the same way as the expression “I am completely lost.”

“For those Chinese people who are completely lost on the enormous World Wide Web, we want to help them easily find their favorite good stuff,” Xu says.

Despite the firewall, Zhuaxia users “find what they want,” according to Mark Long, a student in Beijing. “With tens of millions of blogs and websites, it’s impossible for the government to prevent us from seeing what we want to see. If they block it on CNN, it will turn up on someone’s blog.”

Last May, Ceyuan Ventures, a China-oriented venture capital fund, invested $800,000 in Zhuaxia. “The two guys are the best in China in their space,” says Keyi Chen, a vice president at Ceyuan. “We were impressed by their focus and understanding of user experience. They are committed to fight a long, long battle to win big in the end. And Zhuaxia.com is the obvious leader in China.”

Alexa, the California-based website owned by Amazon that tallies international Web traffic and ranks sites by popularity, ranked Zhuaxia at around No. 5,000 in the middle of April—not bad, considering it has been online for only a year. (In comparison, Chinadaily.com.cn, the main site of the state-owned newspaper, is ranked at around No. 2,300.) The company consists of 15 employees, mostly software engineers, and seven interns. The site doesn’t yet make money; its top priority is growing its user base, currently at 150,000, to attract advertisers. Targeted ads (à la Google) and licensing of its data-mining technology are in the business plans. It has several domestic competitors, but China Web 2.0 Review’s Tangos Chan says, “I’ve used the other readers, and Zhuaxia is the best one in China.”