Chinese business-to-business website Alibaba.com — of whom Yahoo already owns a hefty chunk — has received $100 billion in offers for its $1.5 billion IPO. What are they, Facebook? This is way more interest, of course, than they can accommodate. But there may not in fact be much substance behind the bids. Unlike American stock debuts, where you actually have to front the cash to make an offer, anyone can make a bid on a Hong Kong IPO without having cash-in-hand. Companies will make absurdly high offers in hopes of getting a larger share of the pie. Regardless, this looks likely to be one of the hottest IPOs to hit the market since VMware and Google. [FT]

Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce giant set to launch an initial public offering of a business-to-business unit on November 6, said it now expects to raise $1.49 billion. That makes it the largest tech IPO since Google raised $1.66 billion in 2004. Alibaba founder and former English teacher Jack Ma hasn't missed the connection.

OK, look, Google. There's a reason the United Nations stopped recognizing Taiwan as China in 1971. For starters, there's its military. It's big. Big enough to spot in Google Earth. Then there's China's economy. Its contribution to global economic growth is set to pass even the United States in 2008. These are good reasons to not piss China off. But there you go launching YouTube where? In Taiwan. Smooth. And then China blocks access to your site and many others from the mainland. So you gain access to about 22.9 million Taiwanese and everybody loses access to 1,329,349,388 Chinese. And here we thought you were good at math. Google, why can't you be more like Yahoo? (Photo by ford.)

China is reportedly redirecting all Web traffic to domain names containing the word "search" to Chinese search engine Baidu.com. We suspect that Yahoo is secretly behind this, in a ploy to bid for sympathy before Congressional hearings. [Blogoscoped]

China's Alibaba.com, a business-to-business marketplace, is going public. Yahoo, which already owns a 39 percent stake in the Alibaba Group, will add to its stake in the deal, purchasing 8.2 percent of the $1.33 billion IPO. [WSJ]

The Middle Kingdom's net censors have finally patched up a great gaping hole in the Great Firewall of China, its not-so-effective Internet defense against the rest of the world's free press. It's now blocking all RSS feed traffic in an effort to stop the flow of information critical of the Chinese government. The Public Security Bureau has attempted to quash blogs and other forms of forbidden information ever since the great Chinese Internet surge in 2006. Of course, this ban will probably get swiftly dropped once China's intelligentsia discovers that RSS, besides being used for blog-headlines distribution, is also a vital tool for data transfer from Web-based applications. Photo by David Baron)

In Kara Swisher's otherwise excellent analysis on AllThingsD of the Skype writeoff's effect on Facebook, there's a string of nonsense that desperately bears correction. Swisher ramblingly suggests that eBay bought Skype for some kind of ability to target ads and premium offerings to the VOIP service's users. Nonsense. It's well-documented that eBay CEO Meg Whitman got the idea on a trip to China, where she saw that users of rival auction sites were using VOIP calls and instant messaging to close sales — a useful feature in a country still getting used to conducting business electronically, rather than face to face. Adding Skype to eBay's auctions in China, she hoped, would boost its market share. No such luck.

3Com has agreed to be acquired by Bain Capital for about $2.2 billion in cash — a 44 percent premium over Thursday's closing price. Included in the deal is a minority stake in 3Com for Chinese network giant Huawei Technologies, which is getting control of H3C, the companies' joint venture. By shutting out Nortel, which also was interested in 3Com, Huawei prevents its Canadian rival from getting a foothold in its rapidly expanding home market. [WSJ]

Apparently, the Great Firewall of China — the Chinese government's elaborate system for blocking websites deemed politically incorrect — is only good for censorship, not for boosting the country's network security. Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the Pentagon traced a June attack on U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's computer back to China's People's Liberation Army Chinese officials denied the report — and they want you to know that they're victims, too.

The Internet Society of China forced blog service providers like Yahoo and MSN to sign a "self-disciplinary pact," says Reporters Without Borders. The pact requires blog hosts to "censor content and identify bloggers." Alas, it does not require bloggers to "add value." [Boing Boing]

The streets of Beijing are paved not with gold, or even yuan, but with a flood of fake Harry Potter books:

After yesterday's slapdash jam-job, the Times redeems itself this morning with a lengthy piece on Rupert Murdoch's ties to China. There's not a lot that comes as news to those who (for, say, work reasons) obsessively read every news story about the News Corp. mogul, but for the casual observer it's a fairly good summary. Let us break it down for you.

Yeah, the iPhone is pretty and all, but Palo Altans have been more occupied with a proposal to roll out a Mandarin immersion program in their public schools. While similar programs have been approved in San Francisco and elsewhere in the Bay Area, the proposal is likely to get nixed in Palo Alto . We suspect Caucasian parents don't want to see their kids get whipped by native Chinese speakers in yet another subject. Their next mission? To get math and science cut out of the curriculum. Why should their kids have to mess with that GPA-dragging stuff?

Maybe eBay China execs never learned to speak the native Chingchong tongue, or maybe its Chinese auction site sucked ass, but for whatever reason the company's adventures in the Middle Kingdom have been a spectacular failure. Now—"hundreds" of millions of dollars later—eBay is calling for backup.

"The Cold War is over," a friend of mine loves to say, "and Communism won." As the New York Times says, global U.S.-based Internet companies can't dominate the Chinese market — it's a whole different ballgame. And in search, the market is all Baidu's.

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs decides to actually be funny, writing a scathing review of last weekend's debaucherous Yelp party. Aw, Steve, let 'em have their fun. Weren't you ever young and loaded with millions in funding? [Fake Steve]

Hang with government informants! Bribe execs from Baidu! Microsoft, which recently lost the exec in charge of kicking Google's ass, is currently hunting for an official Google-fighting point man in China. This seems like a great chance to live out those power fantasies of your childhood in a market where competition means more than who has the better engineering department. In China, it's all about tattling on your competitor, jailing dissidents, and buying into the censorship culture. How refreshing after this mamby-pamby liberal Valley environment!

Google finally realized that enemies don't make the best bedfellows, and owning a stake in Chinese search leader Baidu might not jibe with reality. After all, Baidu's marketing strategy is to made a Google caricature bleed on TV. Its favorite competitive tactic is to print Google results and report them to the government — which, according to rumor, is why China blocked Google in 2002.

While Yahoo, whose CEO admitted he might not protect journalists from Nazis, suffers a boycott from UK journalists — "Dammit, Semel, we've alienated that core middle-aged self-righteous British male demographic! Again!" — Google co-founder Sergey Brin (pictured) decides that maybe dealing in censored Chinese searches was a touch evil.

Did AOL exec Jason Calacanis attend the same conference everyone else did? Because he says: