Chinese ringing in the first second of the Lunar New Year on social media bombarded the country’s biggest microblogging service with more than 30,000 messages on Monday, roaring past the previous record for messages per second on a social media site, according to a news release by the company, Sina Weibo, quoted by Chinese news media.

“In the first second of the Year of the Dragon, there were 32,312 concurrent posts,” Do News, a Chinese-language technology news site, reported, citing a company news release. The report said 481,207 messages were posted over the whole first minute of the year.

The figure for that first second far surpassed the highest number of messages per second on Twitter, which occurred last December, when the company reported 25,088 messages per second during the television broadcast in Japan of a beloved anime film. (Twitter’s second highest total — 9,420 messages per second — came earlier this month when the quarterback Tim Tebow won a playoff game in overtime.)

With a steadily increasing number of Chinese flocking to social media services, the Chinese authorities have moved in recent months to rein in its freewheeling and wildly popular microblogs, known as weibos, broadening new regulations that require users to sign up with their real names.

But for now, it appears that the government has not mounted a serious crackdown on anonymous users as social media sites continue to grow. A Chinese government report released last week found that the use of microblogs skyrocketed in 2011, increasing about 300 percent, and that nearly half of all Internet users in China now use social media services in some capacity, according to sections of the report translated by Baidu Beat, an English-language blog published by China’s largest search engine company.

But stricter regulations could limit that growth in the future. The same government report put the number of Web sites at 2.3 million in 2011, up from last year’s total of 1.9 million but still less than the 3.2 million recorded in 2009, before the government imposed new rules surrounding the registration of Web sites.

A number of Chinese dissidents have already left homegrown social media sites, choosing to create a community on Twitter that is beyond the reach of government censorship. The artist Ai Weiwei posts prolifically on Twitter.

On her Seeing Red in China blog, the writer Yaxue Cao on Monday described spending a month following posts by members of that vocal dissident Chinese-language community on Twitter. She writes that some dissidents also post to weibos, where the audiences are much larger, though less intimate.

Because Twitter is blocked in China, its small number of mainland users tend to be those with enough technological know-how to get around the Great Firewall, she observes, creating a debate-filled conversation that she likens to a vibrant tea house. Some of the accounts followed by Ms. Yaxue belong to former student organizers who took part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and others who were forced to leave the country for political reasons:

When one of them (@wurenhua) tweeted about his recent conversation with his 80-year-old mother over the phone and why the mother and son had avoided video chatting (so that they can hide sadness from each other), you get a glimpse of what this exile entails.

While the 140-character limit constrains writing to one or two thoughts in alphabetic languages, Ms. Yaxue says, whole paragraphs are possible in China’s character-based language. The same could also be said of Sina Weibo and other China-based social networks. But on Twitter there is not the same risk that posts will be censored — or “harmonized,” according to the official term of art — and a dissident user’s account terminated.

Of course, any post available for the public can be read by Chinese authorities. In 2010, a Twitter user in China was sentenced to one year of hard labor for a sardonic retweet. Ms. Yaxue notes that dissident accounts often take on a dark tone in the face of this constant pressure:

On Twitter Chinese, you get a steady flow of tweets that cry for help: A has not answered his cell phone for the last two days (who would resurface later tweeting that the police took him away to answer questions); B was summoned by police to “have tea”; and C was not allowed to leave her home.

Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.