Facebook and Twitter may dominate social media in the U.S., but QQ, WeChat and Sina Weibo are the online kings in China.

Of course, it’s not really a fair fight since Facebook and Twitter are blocked by China’s Great Firewall, which censors websites that are deemed objectionable by the government.

The most powerful Internet company in China is Tencent, which owns QQ and WeChat. Together, they have more than 1 billion users, which is triple the population of the United States. Imagine if Facebook and Twitter joined forces and you’ll have some idea of how influential Tencent is in China.

Virtually every student at my school has QQ and/or WeChat. Both services offer instant messaging, group chats, video calls and photo sharing. But each also has its own distinctive features. WeChat has Drift Bottle, where you send a random voice or text message and see if anyone picks it up, and Shake, which connects strangers who are shaking their phones at the same time. QQ offers a variety of online games, music and shopping.

QQ is the older and larger service but WeChat, which started in 2011, is quickly catching up. Like all Internet sites in China, both are subject to government censorship.

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Sina Weibo has long been the go-to site for social commentary and pop-culture gossip in China. It has turned some commentators into celebrities, but it has also landed some of them in prison.

Popular blogger and venture capitalist Charles Xue recently made what appeared to be a forced jailhouse confession on state TV, saying he had spread unverified information on Weibo that violated a new crackdown on online rumor mongering. Though Xue had been arrested for soliciting a prostitute, his supporters claimed it was a ploy to silence his sharp social criticism on subjects such as food safety and military corruption.

So what about Facebook and Twitter? Do they have a future in China?

China just lifted its ban on the two sites in a small free-trade zone in Shanghai, but that audience represents a tiny fraction of China’s 1.3 billion people. After meeting with Chinese Internet regulators in September, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made no public comment on the country’s censorship. She obviously didn’t want to offend authorities who have the power to let Facebook into the world’s largest market.