Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, debuted on the Nasdaq exchange on April 17 with a 19.1 percent jump, the eighth-best debut for a U.S. listed tech stock this year.

Weibo shares rose from the subscription price of $17 to as high as $24.28. The company sought to raise $380 million by selling 20 million shares for as much as $19 each. But underwriters could only find demand for 16.8 million shares at $17, generating $287 million for the company.

Weibo, launched in August 2009, is China’s largest social media platform with 144 million active monthly users.

Though it remains unprofitable, losing $38 million last year and another $47 million in the first quarter of this year, its revenues jumped to nearly $68 million for the three months.

The Shanghai-based Weibo was missioned with a fundamental challenge: progressing from a microblogging phenomenon in China to an important member of the international social media industry.

As Weibo celebrates Wall Streets’ s welcoming waters for it, it’s always at conflicts with censors at home, putting in doubt whether the firm known as the “Twitter of China” may eventually be dismantled by government interference.

A series of detentions of influential online commentators may have hurt Weibo’s user numbers. A study released in this January by Britain’s Telegraph newspaper and East China Normal University in Shanghai showed that the number of Weibo posts have fallen 70 percent since its peak in 2012, after the government required users’ real names before posting content.

Chinese government stipulated a series of policies – requiring real names on social media in early 2012 and introducing new laws prohibiting “rumor-mongering” last September – after the Facebook- and Twitter-fueled Arab Spring protests swept through the Middle East.

However, the opportunity for Weibo remains tremendous with China’s more than 600 million Internet users. But people argued that the harsh online censorship in China could hurt Weibo’s healthy growth, especially as it competes against Wechat— the mobile messaging app launched by rival Tencent Holdings Ltd that has became increasingly  popular in part because it is private by nature.

The China Internet Network Information Center, a state-run agency tracking Internet statistics, said in its annual report released in January that while growth in Weibo dropped 9 per cent in 2013, mobile messaging services witnessed explosive growth, with apps such as WeChat adding more than 78 million new users.