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I'm also guessing Maxthon[1] has a large browser share in China and you'll notice that MSIE6 is in its userstring[2], which could possibly be diluting the results for pure IE6 instead of those with the same engine (Trident[3]).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxthon

[2]: http://www.useragentstring.com/_uas_Maxthon_version_.php

[3]: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trident_(layout_engine)

In Korea specifically, there's a huge ActiveX site base still, especially for government and banking sites.

Some background: Korea historically required SEED for encryption, not SSL, which prevented competition in the browser market:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEED

This would certainly explain the market share of IE in general, but IE 7, 8 and 9 each support ActiveX as well, so I can't imagine that alone is a factor.

Pirated doesn't mean can't be upgraded. Pirated means you can upgrade whatever you want without WGA.