internet - Looking for five million Chinese bloggers

Nothing is more fascinating than the way how figures on China emerge and get a life of themselves. So, we have this figure of 30,000 people policing the internet in China and how we also have this figure of five million webloggers in China. A few weeks away I made jokes about the South China Morning Post that used this figure without any obvious base. Frank Dai of Global Voices came this week up with the same figure.
He bases himself on the often rather solid Blog Herald. But then, their source is the South China Morning Post and we have a nice circle here. It is a well-known feature among traditional media, who give a figure credibility by keeping on re-quoting a very dodgy figure. It still does not help in figuring out how many webloggers there are in China.