Read more about China in our special issue
IT’S a familiar scene the world over. Rows of young men hunched over glowing screens, looking like they’ve been there for days. They are immersed in virtual worlds, surfing the web, or shopping for gadgets.
I’m in a wang ba, or net bar, on bustling Chengfu Street in Beijing. The scene appears at odds with the popular perception of China as a ruthless suppressor of internet freedom: in the run-up to the Chinese Communist Party congress last month, western media reported the censoring of blogs, suspension of websites and even whole internet service providers being closed down. Yet when I ducked into one of the dozens of net bars in the vicinity of Tsinghua University, I couldn’t find an empty seat. Welcome to the Chinese internet.
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I peek at the screens and see no trace of Google, YouTube, eBay or other western sites. Not because they are blocked – most of the time they aren’t – but because users prefer the home-grown versions. Instead of Google, most web searches here use Baidu, the most popular search engine in China and the fourth most visited in the world. And while the hugely popular role-playing game World of Warcraft wins the global battle, it is a mere minnow in China compared with Fantasy Westward Journey – created by NetEase, a company based in Guangzhou, Guangdong province. New Chinese-language news and video sites are popping up every week.
It is true that censorship is a big issue in China, but there’s plenty going on that the censors don’t touch. The vast majority of Chinese net users aren’t interested in organising pro-democracy meetings or using politically sensitive search terms. Like most users, they are more likely to spend their time tracking down the latest news, entertainment and gossip, or communicating with friends and family. Catering to these predilections is a booming business for the companies and entrepreneurs currently building China’s presence on the web. The rest of the world has been largely oblivious to this development, but not for much longer. “Because they will become the largest group of users, the Chinese will to some extent be driving how internet technology evolves,” says global media specialist Rebecca MacKinnon at the University of Hong Kong.
Indeed, the sheer number of users in China – 162 million and counting – is shifting net demographics dramatically (see Chart). Although users in the US still outnumber those in China, the average Chinese user spends 14 to 19 hours per week online, compared with 7 to 10 hours in the US, according to internet polls. And the number of Chinese websites has mushroomed to meet the demands of this net-hungry audience.
It wasn’t always so. Chinese net companies lagged behind the west for years, especially in management expertise. They too went through the dotcom bubble-burstings that followed the millennium, but a wave of savvy start-ups since 2004 has meant that Chinese web companies and users have all but caught up. For every YouTube there are a dozen video-sharing sites, such as Todou and 6rooms. For every Facebook, there are hundreds of social networking sites, such as Xiaonei (which means “on campus”), started by a Tsinghua University graduate. And for every Yahoo, there is a cheeky upstart web portal such as Qihoo, based in Shanghai, to hijack its market share. Qihoo even secured $45 million in funding from US venture capitalists. Some of these sites are blatant copycats, but most are tailored to Chinese web tastes – by incorporating anime-like characters and more on-screen movement than typical western sites, for example.
A few big winners stand out. Take Baidu, arguably the leading internet company in China. It is used for everything from people and product searches, to looking up information in a Wikipedia-style format, to finding pirated music files. The company has grabbed about 60 per cent of the search market, compared with its nearest rival, Google, at about 20 per cent. The reason many prefer Baidu is that its Chinese-language search works better than others, especially for recognising people’s names within strings of Chinese characters. Another key factor is that Baidu is a trusted brand name with the weight, and investment, of the central government behind it. And it is expanding. Baidu chief scientist William Chang plans to grow his team of engineers from 700 to more than 1000 by early next year.
Having made his name at Infoseek – a search engine start-up based in Silicon Valley in the mid-1990s – Chang has a broad perspective on both Baidu and its users. “By and large, Chinese users search for the same things as US users,” he says. Workers at other local internet firms generally agree. “The surprising thing is that Chinese users are not so different from western users,” says Qi Zhong, a developer at HiPiHi, a virtual-worlds start-up in Beijing whose user interface looks a lot like that of virtual world Second Life.
Nevertheless, some clear cultural differences are shaping the Chinese net. Users are much younger, on average, and overwhelmingly urban compared with the west (see Diagram), so there is a greater emphasis on social networking and entertainment sites. Online gaming is much bigger than in the west, and sharing of MP3s and movies is rampant, due to a lack of copyright law enforcement.
“Online gaming is much bigger than in the west, and sharing of MP3s and movies is rampant”
The sheer amount of time spent online in China means that “kids are living on the net”, says Chang. They get the majority of their news from the internet – their only source independent of the government – and so competition for this online audience is fierce.
Inevitably, some sites find themselves outside of Chinese law. All political and porn sites that the authorities discover, as well as Wikipedia and certain other news and information sites, sit behind the “great firewall of China” – they are inaccessible to internet servers within the country. On a day-to-day basis, though, most Chinese web surfers appear indifferent to these controls. “People don’t know what they don’t know,” says MacKinnon. “Censorship is more subtle than most outsiders think.”
There are surprising hints, however, that China’s internet policies could become more open. “People in leadership worry about the stability of society,” says Ma Songde of Beijing’s Institute of Automation, who until last year served in the central government as vice-minister of science and technology. “But blocking sites is not a good method. I think this will be changed within 10 years. People should have access to all information.” Ma hopes this will happen gradually as China builds a more democratic society.
Whether or not the government is ready, there are sure to be major growing pains. In the next five years, many people from rural areas – home to some 700 million people – are expected to log on. Many villages, even remote ones, already have at least one net bar. How to handle the digital divide in the countryside, says Ma, is “a serious problem in economics and technology, and there are different motivations at every level” of government.
Everyone seems to agree that the internet will soon be ubiquitous in China. Then what? Will there continue to be two internets, effectively separated by language, culture and the great firewall? Or will the Chinese net dissolve its borders and integrate with the rest of the globe? “China still has to interact with the world,” says MacKinnon. If they wall themselves off “they won’t be able to function as a global economic power”. Whatever the net impact on its culture and politics, booming China has come so far, so fast, that it’s unlikely to turn back now.
