First things first:

The Internet in China sucks.

It seriously does.

Blocked sites

The above error page is what people in China get if they attempt to access sites like:

• youtube
• vimeo
• twitter
• facebook

…or porn.

This is part of what has been dubbed the Great Firewall of China (防火长城) – a complex system that involves blocked ip’s and monitored internet traffic.

Monitored words

In the past, certain Chinese search queries have been put under monitoring. If you are in China, and you enter a phrase like:

• (Tibetan independence)
• (Tiananmen massacre)
• (Falun Gong)
• (Jiang Zemin and Song Zuying)

…into a search mask, then this might result in your Internet connection being temporarily disrupted. (I turned these words into graphics because I didn’t want The Longest Way to get automatically blocked as well.)

Fear of instability?

Now we might be asking ourselves: with more than 400 million Internet users in China – why make it such a shitty experience for them? Is it about political control?

Yes, at least partly it is. China’s late success is built on a rather fragile foundation: the country has huge masses of migrant workers floating around, the ecological conditions in many areas are very severe, and the general population is becoming increasingly unhappy with the rising cost of living.

So the government has no interest in exposing the population to potential agitation.

Why are foreign news sites accessible?

But isn’t it a bit weird – in this paradigm – that sites like:

• nytimes.com
• bbc.co.uk
• cnn.com
• ft.com
• spiegel.de
• lemonde.fr

…are generally accessible? If Der Spiegel suspects Chinese citizens living in Germany of being “yellow spies” (“Gelbe Spione” 8/27/2007) and subtitles an English article about Falun Gong as “A Faith and its Oppressors” (03/12/2007) – then how come it has not been permanently banned yet?

One reason could be the language barrier. Maybe the government assumes that the majority of the people won’t be agitated by foreign language sources – simply because they can’t understand them.

But maybe it is more complicated than that.

Let’s look at some of the major sites that have been banned (and some that haven’t been) – and let’s also check out their Chinese counterparts:

Youtube or Youku?

Youtube and Vimeo have been blocked, while smaller video sites like Dailymotion and Metacafe are still accessible as of now. Maybe they just haven’t been noticed yet.

But behold, there are Chinese video sites as well! One of them is Tudou.com:

And another one is Youku.com:

I have tried both of these sites (uploading and streaming), and they can’t hold a candle to either Youtube or Vimeo. Their compression techniques are horrible, their content consists mainly of pirated materials, and their user interfaces are just plain messy. But since they are facing no real competition, they are still huge in China.

Twitter or Weibo?

How about Twitter then? Of course there are numerous Chinese twitter copycats, the most famous being Sina’s weibo.com:

And, I gotta say this, this one is actually very good. It allows you to upload videos and pictures, it is very fast and surprisingly rich in features. And with its only real rival out of the game, it just plain dominates the Chinese market.

Facebook or Kaixin?

It is interesting that Facebook is blocked, while Myspace is again accessible in China. Is Myspace not considered a threat anymore? Or is it just not worth being blocked, because it is shrinking anyway?

Anyway, the Chinese have their own social networks. One of them is renren.com:

And the other one is kaixin001.com:

And just like vkontakte.ru in Russia or studivz.net in Germany, these two are essentially just Facebook clones. Their functionality isn’t as advanced as that of the original, but they seem to be getting the job done. And all they have to do is fight each other over a quickly expanding market.

Wikipedia or Baike?

It’s interesting that Wikipedia used to be blocked before, but has been accessible for the last couple of years (even wikipedia.tw). But then of course, there is a Chinese alternative to this one as well – it’s called baike.baidu.com:

When you are looking for stuff about China, this site is often a bit more comprehensive than Wikipedia (unless you are looking for controversial topics of course). It seems weird that Wikipedia would be allowed in China, but then maybe some of its pages are selectively filtered out. Or is it just not dangerous to Baike?

Skype or QQ?

When we look at messenger programs, it is interesting that none of them are blocked at all: not Skype, not MSN, and most of the time, not even Googletalk. Are they just looked upon as better E-mail clients?

Anyway, there is one more player in the game – QQ:

This penguin-faced, bubbly messenger client represents one of the largest online communities in the world (with possibly even more members than Facebook), and most young people in China have at least one or two accounts on this (with web spaces, blogs, mobile applications and all kinds of stuff that are attached to it). QQ is so deeply rooted in the Chinese Internet experience, it doesn’t have to fear anyone.

Protecting the economy

What all of this comes down to is that the Chinese government – by blocking certain sites – is not only trying to protect itself. In fact, it is also shielding off essential parts of the Chinese Internet economy.

The basic assumption is, that Chinese Internet users, just like anybody else, are pretty pragmatic. They use whatever seems best to them, regardless of where it is from. If Facebook was available, it could possibly kill both Renren and Kaixin, just like it has (almost) killed Studivz in Germany. Twitter might have kept Weibo small before it could get good, and Youtube and Vimeo could have easily kicked Tudou’s and Youku’s sorry asses. Maybe Baike and QQ just didn’t need that kind of protection.

Anyways, these companies have greatly profited from the political scheme that is called Great Firewall of China, and with Internet companies like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter valued at billions and billions of dollars, it actually makes some sense to try to protect them.

Even at the price of having an Internet that sucks.