Despite Banning Twitter, 92% of China Netizens Use Social Media
According to a recent report, Chinese netizens are twice as likely to use chat and three times more likely to micro-blog, blog and use video conference than American users. The Netpop Research study shows that mainland Chinese citizens are "more likely to share information broadly and openly." This comes as a surprise as the country's censorship has been such a topic of contention. Nevertheless, the study estimates that up to 92% of Chinese netizens use social media, meanwhile, only 76% of US netizens do the same.
Although their actions have been widely criticized in the West, large companies like Google and Yahoo adhere to the Chinese government's content censorship demands simply to meet this huge Asian market. The country has an online population of 304 million people and is expected to reach 500 million in 2015. Some service challenges to the People's Republic of China include the requirement of all computers to come equipped with Green Dam censoring software and a list of words and phrases banned from use.
If you're going to speak about Taiwan as independent country, or the Falun Dafa and religious freedom, or even the subject of democracy, your comments and site are going to get banned. For instance, Twitter and Facebook were blocked in China after a demonstration for religious freedom led by a group of 1000 Uighur Muslims turned ugly. As users began micro-blogging the event that reportedly left at least 140 dead, the government intervened and service was suspended.
While China's constitution guarantees freedom of speech, the government employs a "subversion of state power" clause to punish those who are critical of it. Most notably this clause has been used against religious protestors like the Uighur; however, in this case the mentality of blocking dissenters can also be carried over to major social networking sites like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Bing. Nevertheless, censorship in China is not new and it certainly isn't only a product of the Communist government.
In the 1200's Chinese painters used symbols of plants and animals to express their distaste for the government. For instance, the water lily came to symbolize pureness of heart because even in the murky waters of their foreign oppressors, the Chinese people would thrive and survive. If the Chinese really are "more likely to share information broadly", is it possible that under all this effort to stifle them, there are still water lilies in our midst?
Photo Credit: Max Smith, A Chinese Type 95 SPAAG vehicle on display at the "Our troops towards the sky" exhibition at the Beijing Military Museum
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china needs to stop blocking everything......Nightlife Simplified http://wwww.ClubDistrict.com
peace, love and positive energy
Is RWW a political website?I can't believe such a biased political article would be allowed here.China will block RWW,too.
"after a demonstration for religious freedom led by a group of 1000 Uighur Muslims turned ugly. As users began micro-blogging the event that reportedly left at least 140 dead, the government intervened and service was suspended. "
——The author is misleading the readers.
Those Muslims are terrorists. Most of the 140 dead are Han Chinese civilians who were Innocently killed by those muslims on streets.
Think before talk!Dana Oshiro!
I read ReadWriteWeb daily and like your stories. Only this time, I feel not only shocked, but also humiliated, by this story wrote by Dana Oshiro.
To call the story misleading is just too modest, it is completely distorting the facts. The 140 dead were mostly Han Chinese and were all killed by Muslim rioters. Chinese government shut down micro-blogging because strong evidence showed that a group of Muslim extremists were leading the riot from abroad and used micro-blogging as a way to pass-out new commands.
I understand everyone has his/her own point of viewing the world. But any opinion must be derived from facts. False accusation based on ill-conceived story shall be banned!
What a horrendously misleading title, 92% of Chinese netizens is very far from being remotely the same as 92% of China's population.
Sensasionalism will always prevail?
Twitter is only thing in social media???? noooo
Posted by: Jay Martinez
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August 5, 2009 1:04 PM
it's true. that's all there is. get used to it!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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August 5, 2009 1:05 PM
Crsh, good point, we've updated the title.
What a naive article! Do your own research before you mention that riot. Religious freedom = free to kill other people? Can you say Osama bin Laden is right to kill because he pursues religious freedom?
There are many social networks including clones of facebook and twitters in China, so people have more choices. In fact, Online chatting like QQ and BBS/Online communities are so much more widely used in China that no microblogging sites has really won in market.
I've been in China for the past month on business. I arrived on the day of the riots and the day that Twitter and Facebook stopped working.
Echoing the comments above:
"...after a demonstration for religious freedom led by a group of 1000 Uighur Muslims"
Very misleading. The riot was started by a separatist group of muslims. Uighurs do not associate themselves with the rioters, who are what we would call in the west - terrorists.
Social networking sites were censored immediately as it was discovered that extremists outside the country were using them to spread disinformation. As an example, video footage of an Iraqi girl being stoned (article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-452288/The-moment-teenage-girl-stoned-death-loving-wrong-boy.html) was used by extremist leaders, saying that the girl was a Uighur being beaten to death by Han Chinese. There was a lot of disinformation, doctored photos etc and it was all being spread by the internet to incite unrest.
That the government took steps to quell this might seem extreme to us Twitter-loving idiots, but when it helps save lives and protect social harmony - how can anyone complain about that?
China doesn't want to hide the truth. Spend any time in China and watch the state news and you'll see that. They didn't pretend there was nothing going on in Xinjiang, it was all over the news, each and every day with all the grisly details. The censorship of social media is just an attempt to prevent further damage by people with ill intent.
I will say though, that I'm not sure this kind of censorship is that effective. The Great Firewall is easily evaded by using any proxy service - those that really want to can still access Twitter and Facebook just fine, including those who want to try to incite violence and unrest :/
as a chinese living in the US, i have seen all sorts of "necessary" censorships on twitter, facebook, youtube etc etc regarding to sensitive topics, apart from convention media. it's actually pretty entertaining to watch the western media claiming themselves "unbiased" and criticizing chinese media. the procedure of choosing and forging material is rather artistic. why would i buy tickets for movies when i can enjoy hollywood style shows on the news here?
being able to check with my own eyes what's going on in china and comparing what's on the show here in the states, i feel kinda bad about how american people are being fooled and tricked. but why would a chinese worry about it...
afaik, after the role of the US in the incidents of tibet and xinjiang for the past two years, the reputation and credit of western media in china are pretty much damaged. unlike in the mid 80s when everyone was trying to listen to the "different voice" from the outside (i was one of them too), nobody actually would reject.
but anyway, the way media mutes certain voices here in the US is much implicit but more efficient than chinese system, which truly amazed me.
Leaving aside the problems with the way the Urumqi riots are described, which numerous previous comments have already noted, the problem with this piece is the implicit assumption that US- or other western-based social media services are really important to Chinese Internet users. Yes, there are some Chinese who use Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services that have been blocked in China. But the overwhelming majority of people interested in SNS will use, say, QQZone, or Xiaonei (recently rebranded Renren), or the very popular SNS Kaixin001, or 51.com. Youtube is blocked, but long before that Youtube was a distant also-ran in the Internet video race, far behind sites like Youku.com and Tudou.com. Microblogging sites like Jiwai.de, Fanfou, and Zuosa -- all of which, lamentably, are now out of service in the aftermath of Urumqi -- all boast(ed) user numbers that dwarf the number of Twitter users in China. It's really astonishing to me that not a one of these sites and services is so much as mentioned in this piece. In the case of Twitter, referred to in the piece's title, if we go with the 20 million global users number I've seen recently and assume, VERY generously, that China accounted pre-block for 5% of those, that's a million Twitterers in China, out of 338 million Internet users, or less than 1/3 of 1 percent. This makes the title look pretty silly, like saying, "Despite banning unicycles, 92% of pedal-powered vehicle enthusiasts are riding."
China has a distinct and quickly evolving Internet culture that continues to diverge from the more familiar culture of the Anglophone Internet. It's a culture that remains quite poorly understood outside of China, except among a small number of non-Chinese who've immersed themselves in it. It's a culture that goes beyond the memes, the slang, and the Web phenomena that occasionally draw the attention of the outside world. It's a culture that increasingly shapes Chinese society at large, with an impact that extends far beyond pop- and youth culture to wield significant weight at the highest levels of power in China.
While popular media outside of China may give the simplistic impression that Internet culture has languished under a censorious regime, or that the Web has only served as a breeding ground for strident young nationalists, anyone familiar with the Chinese Internet knows there's much more to it than this. Yes, there's censorship, and most people who are aware of it are annoyed by it and by the patronizing, paternalistic attitudes behind it. But the Chinese Internet is an extremely vibrant, fully-fledged ecosystem, and online discourse -- while still taking place within very real limitations -- is nonetheless quite far-ranging, and often surprisingly critical of authorities.
Failure to appreciate the characteristics of China's Internet culture has hobbled foreign investors, entrepreneurs, and established Western Internet companies as they've sought footing in the digital market here. And it's served to widen an already yawning chasm that separates Chinese and Anglophone westerners in their increasingly frequent -- and, I fear, ever more vituperous -- encounters online.
"If you're going to speak about Taiwan as independent country, or the Falun Dafa and religious freedom, or even the subject of democracy, your comments and site are going to get banned."
This a patently untrue. While some keywords are blocked, including Falun Dafa/Gong, topics such as religious freedoms, democracy and Taiwan are regularly commented upon, sometimes in quite heated ways.
The only events which tend to be 'harmonised' (as locals put it) are acute events of political instability (such as Xinjiang) or events of social unrest, such as mass rioting, that the government will fear will spread.
The tools that are used in harmonisation are blunt - simple blocking or demanding all forum/blog posts matching a keyword be deleted (blogs and forums in China are much more centralised than in the West, in part due to regulation, in part culture). They are becoming sharper, and I believe that's a good thing, as it allows more freedom, as does competition from Western companies like Google.
There were numerous other errors in this article.
Read Write Web is a respected publication, I rarely comment here, but felt the need to this time since the article was misleading in the extreme. For general China issues, especially those of Censorship, I'd recommend an editor or anyone interested in the issues of China and censorship read the blog of Rebecca McKinnon, former CNN China head, and now lecturing on media in Hong Kong. She is an expert in her field, and doesn't spout nonsense, unlike the article above. Her blog address: http://rconversation.blogs.com/
Posted from China (via SSH, coz the Great Firewall is easily hopped).
@Most Chinese commenters: you need to read more nuance into people's writing. Moreover, you need to stop seeing as malicious that which is simply misinformed. "Went ugly" is a pretty good description for what happened with the riots in Xinjiang. It's absolutely true that most victims were Han, though I highly doubt the Uighur victims were killed by other Uighurs -- but the writer doesn't say who the victims were at all. What's more, calling it a terrorist act is stupid and silly -- it was a race riot, and they've happened around the world, including in the US. That said, Ms. Oshiro could've broadened her focus to consider that all kinds of "mass incidents" get censored, not just the ones that involve minorities,
@Kaiser, you're spot on. The Chinese Internet is a fundamentally different experience from the Western Internet and it's disappointing that RWW is not up to speed on that fact.
@Alex, you're right for the most part, and it's nice to see a shout out to RMack, but you also need to consider the latest censorship trend of putting sites "up for maintenance" for extended periods of time. Keyword blocks are always present but temporarily shutting down or even killing a site during or after an incident is both bad for freedom and anti-competitive, as it limits the number of fora available for Chinese. Censorship, in the end, will always an enemy of freedom.
Richard and Marshall,
RWW is such an exceptional blog in its area of expertise. I feel you should either find a way to systemically improve your coverage of China (not easy) or just let these stories go. I remember talking to Richard about this at Web2Expo in NY just about 1 year ago. Interested in talking about how? Email or DM me.
Why did Chinese authorities ban Twitter when it is a site that almost no one in China knows or uses?
I'll excerpt from a comment I wrote on my blog (CNReviews piece on Tania Branigan, Guardian China Correspondence):
The chinese government is no longer threatened by objective Western media coverage about current events because (a) it is in English and the average Chinese reader doesn’t relly have access to it, (b) they have the GFW safety valve that they can shut off at any time if they really have to, and (c) from past experience the Western media just doesn’t have that much effect on Chinese popular opinion.
However, they *are* threatened by social media and internet based communications methods. These are threatening on two levels. One one level, it is a form of uncontrolled citizen journalism and civic commons that allows uncontrolled news and rumors to spread and take on life among Chinese people.
Microblogging, BBS, community sites, and other social media also can be used–or subverted, from the point of view of the government–for what military analysts call C3I – Communications, Commmand, Control, and Intelligence. In other words, a social network could form the basis of a communications infrastructure that enables protesters and rioters to coordinate a protest or uprising that would be threatening to the government. This general theme was highlighted by Sky Canaves of WSJ China Journal in a piece entitled Shutting Down Communications to Prevent More Protest. But I see this theme in the choice of what sites to shut down.
Why leave the BBC wide open, but shut down Twitter (who very few in China use)? Because protest organizers and terrorists can’t use the BBC to subvert the government, but they can use Twitter.
@kaiser Wow, you rock.
@Yi "but anyway, the way media mutes certain voices here in the US is much implicit but more efficient than chinese system, which truly amazed me." That is true, you used to just have to call someone a communist, now if there's a freedom to be denied or a political philosophy to be pushed terrorist works better.
@stinson One thing find disturbing is the compliance of Internet firms to censor themselves.
Waving a stick that will destroy a business seems to be the main enforcement trick of the central government, rather than utilisation of more direct means. And not always the website itself, I recall in 2006 stories starting to break of widespread close-downs of data warehouses and server farms; in the infrastructure-chain of hosting a website or webservice, the weakest/most afraid link takes a site down usually well before the government does.
I do think foreign firms in China are a good thing. It promotes diversity, which hastens change. Living in China is liberating, as it is a society that is embracing openness, and whose track record is definitely on the side of becoming more liberal with freedoms. It still has a long way to go.
Looks like the "China Internet Gang" is thankfully countering this ridiculous post with great vim and vigor.
Let me know if you're interested in content written by someone who actually knows something (anything!) about the Internet in China.
@Elliot: great point, but I feel like China scapegoated SM after Urumqi -- there's potential there for mischief, but few mass incidents seem to have a SM origin. In Xinjiang the rioters/demonstrators reportedly used low-tech means to organize, and other demonstrations in China such as the Wenzhou riots spread via early-gen SM technology like text messages and BBS posts.
@Alex: different issue, but Westerners seem to over-idealize Western businesses as "moral" as compared to Chinese businesses. Even for Google, the bottom line is making money, and that may mean self-censorship. Yet forcing websites down isn't the policy of businesses -- what business voluntarily shutters itself? -- but of government.
@Sage: I still wanna find that 50 Cent style guide ;-)
the events that happened will probably never be truthfully told.what the govt says often is contradicitve to what actually happened and after living in china for 4 years, events like this rarely come to our attention.if we typed tibet last year, our internet was shut down. most chinese i work with dont have a clue about such event other than the propoganda that is spread.the truth will never be known.and im not just bitchin bout the govt...i know that western media has a great way of contorting facts.as for facebook-it sux that its blocked but sites like facebook/youtube are less controllable by the chinese govt so they shut it down, sites like youku and 56.com etc are run in china,therefore easier to control and as if anyone running these sites wants to piss off the govt after people go missing for blogging facts about corrupt officials etc.Meh-some people just like to argue with whatever is said by anyone-whatever...but dont get ya knickers in a twist over an article like this
also
the GFW sux-whilst talkin on skype international phonecalls are monitored and when something bad is said about china or the olympics-the call is promptly shut down.sites are shut down for less than statements about tibet or the dalai lama-an australian site was shut down after a member wrote a few bad words about shanghai...
Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life.
KZ
Email Marketing Software
Regarding that huge number of potential users, the chinese webmasters should make their own version of Twitter instead.. or have they?
It's understandable why the Chinese are big into Social Networking.
1) They are trying to quickly catch up to the Western World way of living / trends.
2) The country is massive and utilizing the Internet helps them more effectively communicate.
3) The country is still trying to ditch its "communist" past (dull gray / black clothing, to showing expression ...)
Yet the Chinese are quickly becoming an economic powerhouse.
http://www.thelifeofluxury.com/china-growing-desire-for-luxury-products/
Ignoring Urumqi riots about murders of Uighur migrant workers because of rape rumours (state says, 'rumours') and the rights and wrongs of censorship in theory, 2 points from travelling in China.
1) The Chinese state education system inculcates in the Chinese from kneehigh that any criticism of anything related to China, from 'I don't like the food' to 'China imprisons and tortures Tibetan monks' is a spiteful, mean, cruel personal insult to all Chinese people, as is any suggestion about less control in Tibet, that the Falun Gong do not incite murdering your parents, etc. So you'll never meet a Chinese person get emotional, patriotic and shrill on these topics. Besides, debate has no place in Chinese culture - it's rude and disrespectful, like quarrelling here.
2) Even the briefest acquaintance with modern Chinese history reveals that the country was virtually in a state of civil war until the early/mid seventies(except when it was also at war with Japanese invadors on its soil). Some periods are called war, others 'cultural revolution' etc. But since the country is so vast that any 'war' consisted of lots of separate groups and armies fighting,with poor communication between them and often different aims, while e.g. the cultural revolution consisted of lots of groups fighting, with poor communications and often different aims, it's actually one long period of unrest. So the Chinese state's policy of pouring oil on troubled waters by any means necessary - censorship, suppressing dissidents, lies - is fair to install a relatively young peace. Generally they are biased pro-Han, but not always. For instance, I personally suspect there were rapes by Uighurs in Guangdong, but the government line is always 'nothing happened it's just a rumour'.
But, yes, the government is at fault. It causes 2 problems.
1 Everything is covered in the news, biased, or not covered if it can't be biased - yes earthquake, no parents' protests over school construction methods and corrupt officials. Lack of certain truth means people trust any old thing - i know people who look up their news on youtube, and trust it as much as the bbc - which is why they believed every wild rumour on the web.
2 Also, having instilled such reckless nationalism in their people, they have trouble controlling it and the blindness it causes. Most Han resent that ethnic minorities get all sorts of real and perceived advantages, e.g. extra points on the university entrance exam which is insanely difficult and decides your future fate in one go, but tell me 'what do the Uighurs want? We've given them lots of roads etc.' i.e. know nothing about the other ethnicities and can't see that they might not want their benevolent dictatorship however many roads they get.
I didn't mean to imply i don't know all the problems with western democracy or media, no-one is more critical than i - unless they work for z.net.
http://shanghaiist.com/2009/08/11/how_blogging_put_amoiist_in_jail_an.php
heres a little article about the importance of blogging in china and dangers of it.
blogging releases secrets that the govt wants to suppress and here is proof
I am a total Chinese, who never went aboard. And i did not surprise with this article posted by Dana. There could be even worse comments thanks to this information asymmetry.
I may say, i get a close friend who live in Jiefang Road, Urumqi, where the riot break out. There could be more than 140 Han Chinese dead, someone still missing, including my friend mother.
What the riot is Few Uighur, been stired by Genoa, trying to against the government, nothing about religious. About the few Unighur, mostly come from South and North of Xinjiang Province, where was badly undeveloped and less attentioned. The extreme acts always came from the original desires. And they are just simple people want a better life. Additionly, they are have a long barbarous history, you may google Uighur for the their life hundreds years ago. Simple mind been stired by Genoa, they thought they may fight back something. So they crash the restaurants, they break though the shop with broadsword. They killing a man, put the body on the car, then burn it. They catch a woman, took off her cloth, then oil her, set a fire...
You may have chance to see the pictures maybe some years later.
It's glad to see that still most of the readers are not misled.
About government, i should say, they do block something, even in other area, or other things. We do not have much democracy or fair or rights. Anyway, thanks to your concern, i get to say, we are good. You should know it's 1.3 billion people have to manage, there's too much different between South and North, East and West. You should know that many of them are really simple, they don't think democracy is better than a TV set. They don't have much desires, maybe only want to fishing a whole life beside his grass house. For those who have dream who more needs, he can go aboard, he can immigrant.
The internet been blocked, also SMS being blocked in Xinjiang, all because, we are simple mind, do not know its right or wrong. Yes, the measurement for preventing bad things happen could effect some good things going on. How bad it is, how good it could be, we both can not judge it.
What we can judge, are they happy in China? Come to China, try to ask Chinese people, ask them from East to West, South to North.
People do realize that twitter still don't have a Chinese interface, and as of my last years visit to China in may 2008; Chinese GBK coded tweets would come up as ASCII junk on my mobile phone. This meant that tweet users in China are most likely be English speakers and they most likely be foreign ex-pats anyways. Hence, why banning twitter have minium effect on Chinese Netizens. Especially when most them are stock QQ earning and spending QQ coins.
In order to understand social media in China, I think you have to situate the concept in the local culture. In China, relationships (guanxi) are a dominant social force, and individuals rely on their connections to do everything.
Connections generally arise from certain types of relationships--family, school, hometown to name a few--and need to be maintained through guanxi-building activities like drinking, eating, gift-giving etc.
In ancient China, social networking was basically confined to a household or village setting, and maintaining relationships/building social capital was largely a face to face, geographically bounded process.
Fast forward to post-Mao China where a massive rural to urban migration is taking place, dislocating individuals and challenging traditional means of generating social capital, and the necessity for creating virtual forms of guanxi-building (social capital building) develops.
Social media is catching on in China because it is an effective means to maintain social relationships for Chinese netizens living in an increasingly dislocating environment.
In a nut-shell, social media and social capital need to be considered together if you want to understand Social Media in China.
Jonathan L. Heeter