Chinese actress and microblog "queen" Yao Chen has become the first person with 5 million online fans, showcasing the rapid development of microblogs in the world's most populous country.

Yao had 5,000,0001 fans on the China's most popular Twitter-like microblog service, t.sina.com.cn, at 2:34 p.m. Friday, and the number had grown by another 3,744 in one and a half hours, according to Yao's microblog at t.sina.com.cn/yaochen.

A sina.com.cn statement crowned Yao "queen of the microblogs," saying Yao attracts netizens because she expresses her true feelings on her microblog like old friends.

The 32-year-old actress rocketed to fame in 2006 for her role in the popular sitcom My Own Swordsman. She also starred in the phenomenally-successful television series Lurk screened in 2008.

Yao is the first non-Twitter microblogger in the world's top ten microbloggers, according to asiadigitalmpa.com, an Asia Pacific-focused social media and word-of-mouth marketing firm, the sina.com.cn statement said.

Yao has more microblog fans than American TV host Oprah Winfrey.

Sina's microblog service had 50 million users at the end of Oct. 2010.

As many as 157,542 entries were posted in the first minute of 2011, or 2,625 entries per second.

The number of people using the Internet in China had risen to 457 million by the end of 2010, up 73.3 million from a year earlier, meaning over one-third of the Chinese population is online, according to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

Microblog users totaled 53.11 million, or about 13.8 percent of all Chinese netizens, at the end of last year, said CNNIC.