We took a look at virtual goods and social gaming in China, last week. Today, we’ll look at the app ecosystem inside RenRen.com and Kaixin.com; of these two sister sites, RenRen is the more popular and has one of the most open developer platforms in the country. We’ll look at how they present and promotes apps to users but focus more on RenRen.

Background

RenRen.com is one of China’s top 3 social networks. Together with sister SNS Kaixin.com, it accounts for around 16% of the total social network market in China, according to a 2009 report on social network usage released by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).

16% may not seem like much (we last reported Facebook’s estimated U.S. market share to be hovering around 58.6%), but it’s a sizable figure for the highly fractured China social networking market. According to the chart above, ‘other networks’ combine to make up around 15% of the total market, or nearly as much as RenRen.com. Unlike in the U.S. or other markets around the world where one or two dominant players have tended to emerge, China’s social networking market includes many smaller players. Here, the CNNIC has chosen to group these as ‘other.’

The CNNIC estimates that the average user has multiple social network profiles – around 2.7 per user, to be exact. The graph shows the how much of that 270% belongs to each of the major networks:

To calculate our 17% market share estimate for RenRen.com, we combined percentage figures for RenRen.com and Kaixin.com — both owned and operated by parent media company Oak Pacific Interactive, who has also recently announced that it will merge the two sites’ userbases. Then we divided by 2.7 to capture the number of users on social networks. Notice that the ‘Other’ category makes up a very substantial percentage of the total.

Overall, RenRen.com is China’s 14th most trafficked site, while Kaixin.com trails as the 122nd most trafficked site. This is according to Alexa, an imperfect web measurement service that is one of the few to make China web traffic publicly viewable. Kaixin001.com, on the other hand, is China’s 11th most visited site. Note that Kaixin.com and Kaixin001.com are not the same social networking service. Kaixin001.com was established in early 2008, seven months before Kaixin.com, and continues to occupy a very significant portion of Chinese social networking traffic.

Now, let’s take a quick look at the portals themselves. Both RenRen.com and Kaixin.com have identical user interfaces, save for slight color theme variations. Additionally, both networks leverage one app directory to bring social games to millions of users every day.

The RenRen.com homepage: friend updates, requests in the upper right-hand corner, instant messaging at the bottom, and a tab for apps in the blue section at the top of the page.

The Kaixin.com homepage. Same friend updates, same requests in the upper right-hand corner, and same app directory link, this time in orange.

Market share split:

Why is Kaixin.com so far behind its sister site? RenRen.com started out as Xiaonei.com, one of China’s earliest and most popular social networking services. Like Facebook, Xiaonei seeded itself from within college campuses (its name means ‘on campus’) and fueled its growth by leveraging the high interconnectedness of college networks. Later, Xiaonei’s parent company, Oak Pacific Interactive, decided to rebrand the site as the network for ‘everybody,’ or RenRen. In late 2008, an Oak Pacific subsidiary company, Qianxiang Wangjing, observed the increasing popularity of Kaixin001.com, and of its apps and games, and quickly launched a competitor site, Kaixin.com. In popular usage, the ‘001′ gets left out, so both go by ‘Kaixin,’ which simply means ‘happy.’ In May of 2009, Kaixin001.com filed an unfair competition lawsuit against Oak Pacific for starting the site, which, according to China Daily, remains unresolved today.

Anyway, Kaixin.com jumped into the social networking game a little later than others, as its traffic numbers clearly indicate. At the same time, though it offered apps and games earlier than some of its competitors, Kaixin001.com remains closed to 3rd party development to this day. For the remainder of this article, we will look apps from the RenRen.com portal – one that’s both open to 3rd party development and sees significant traffic from China’s millions of social game players.

Major features:

The App Directory

Like top social games in the United States, the most popular Chinese social games demonstrate a remarkable lack of game genre diversity. Farming games dominate across the board. Other popular game themes are fish / aquarium, pets / animals,  and restaurants / kitchen.

RenRen’s top five games showcase familiar themes with a few variations: several are developed in-house by the SNS itself, and payments look a little different in China than what we’ve seen thus far on Facebook.

1 – Sunshine Ranch by Rekoo
18,932,037 monthly active users
1.6 million daily active users

Sunshine Ranch is a ranching and livestock game where users grow crops, raise animals, manage farm operations, and engage in ‘friendly competition’ to drive their ranch to the top of the leaderboard.

In an interview with Inside Social Games last August, Rekoo CEO Patrick Liu indicated that Sunshine Ranch was already seeing 7 million DAUs across all Chinese platforms at that time, and today it still holds the number one spot on RenRen.

2 – RenRen Café by RenRen
8,142,643 MAUs
870,172 DAUs

In RenRen Café, users recruit friends to be their café’s head chef, to act as waitstaff, or to “scrub the toilet.” The café also incorporates numerous self-expression mechanisms – users can earn or purchase unique decorations and specialty dishes to enhance their café and get ahead.

Notably, RenRen Café is developed in-house, and features fancier-than-usual 3D graphics:

3 – Building One by Shanghai Kai Ying Network Technology Co.
5,092,524 MAUs
588,491 DAUs

Building One is a virtual world that somewhat mirrors the increasingly common urban Chinese experience of living, working, and playing in mixed-use high-rises. Users play house, run a small business, and simultaneously socialize and compete with friends and neighbors. Building One is developed by Shanghai-based Kai Ying Network Technology Co., which received an undisclosed amount in a funding round from Kleiner Perkins’s China branch earlier this month.

4 – Happy Farmer by Beijing Tong Chi-Star Technology Co.

6,173,628 MAUs
574,688 DAUs

Happy Farm, likely to be China’s most popular social game, mirrors the familiar farm game mechanisms that have helped to make farm-themed games on Facebook wildly popular.

But this is not that Happy Farm. Well, not exactly. The ‘Happy Farm’ we’re familiar with here is the popular game by Five Minutes that made its way onto Facebook in mid-2009. According to AppData, Five Minutes’ Happy Farm is seeing 2,945,975 monthly active users and 921,131 DAUs.

According to an independent Chinese application data service, Five Minutes’ Happy Farm is seeing 27 million MAUs and 3.4 million DAUs on RenRen. So why didn’t we see it on “Most Popular” leaderboard (sorted by MAUs) within the portal itself? It appears that there may be a disconnect between RenRen’s own way of displaying and promoting certain apps and how well other apps are doing.

Happy Farmer is an identical knockoff, created by a company called Beijing Tong Chi-Star Technology Co., Ltd. Development, that made it into the top 5 when we took this snapshot, but is in fact not as popular as Five Minutes’ Happy Farm. We’ve reached out to contacts in the Chinese social gaming industry for comment, and will explore this question more in the next article in this series.

5 – Happy Aquarium by 6 Waves
4,688,484 MAUs
539,880 DAUs

Not to be confused with Crowdstar’s Happy Aquarium on Facebook, 6 Waves’ Happy Aquarium is that developer’s most popular app on RenRen, and its only app to have made it into this recent top five. Users get ahead by raising aquatic pets (some are more valuable than others), and decorating their aquariums with magical props.

Note: It appears this app may actually be made by Twofishes Interactive, as the developer has a very similar app called “My Fishbowl” on Facebook. That app has been promoted through 6 Waves.

In our observations of the leaderboard, significant traffic to the RenRen app platform is going to apps developed in-house by the SNS itself. This includes RenRen Cafe, noted above, but also factors in such non-game apps as photo albums, gifts, and a ‘voting’ app. Other top apps come from larger developers who have already made forays into markets outside of China’s SNS. Within the leaderboard’s top 20, many of the same names come up over and over again, not unlike lists we’re seeing on AppData week over week.

Update: Happy Aquarium was actually developed by Happy Elements Co., formerly Twofishes Interactive Co., while being published by 6 Waves, according to Haining Wang, Senior Director of Platform, Value-Added Services, and Social Gaming at RenRen.com.

Will they monetize?

How much money is there in the Chinese social games market? We noted in the last article in this series that the virtual goods market in China is estimated to be tracking toward $5 billion for 2010, while our latest numbers show the virtual goods market to be heading towards $1.6 billion in the U.S. But, what percentage of the impressive $5 billion is actually coming from virtual goods transacted within social games? Developers are not yet publicizing data on the ARPUs they’re currently seeing, but here are a few things we do know:

1. Chinese networks are notoriously difficult to break in to because not all are not open to third party app development. Kaixin001 and QZone, China’s two biggest social networks, currently feature in-house apps only.

2. Those that do officially allow third party development are often open only to ‘select’ developers who have cultivated business relationships (‘guanxi’) with the SNS. Additionally, as we’ve previously learned from an interview with Rekoo CEO Patrick Liu, the SNS often takes around a 50% cut of revenues.

3. Direct payment by bank card still seems the most common way to pay. Apps on RenRen integrate with payments provider YeePay, which offers bank card payment, mobile payment via SMS, prepaid card and timed IVR, but NOT credit card payment.

4. As of yet, there are no advertising offers of the likes we see on Facebook, but we did observe that you can now ‘earn’ points on Sunshine Ranch by inviting your friends to install the app.

We have previously noted an increase in Chinese developers creating apps for Facebook – enticed by its openness and massive global audience. We are also now seeing significant foreign capital flowing in to the Chinese social games market, despite recent barriers imposed by the Chinese government in the form of a ‘ban against foreign investment in the online games industry.’ (Note that this would explain why Shanghai Kai Ying Network Technology Co. received its recent multimillion dollar infusion from KPCB’s China gropu.) In the next post in our China social games series, we’ll take a look at the promises and pitfalls of the Chinese developer landscape, and look at why some of China’s most promising companies are looking to social networks beyond their borders.

Source: Inside Social Gaming (January 28, 2010)

A Look at the Social Gaming Ecosystem on China’s RenRen.com is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Fanfou, Jiwai and Digu were some of the first Twitter clones to become successful in China.

However all three – plus Twitter itself – were blocked by the Chinese government in July 2009, because of their usage during the uprisings in Ürümqi. According to an AFP article, Chinese authorities blamed online agitators for helping to stoke violence in that region.

China’s Twitter Clones is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

(Fortune Magazine) — What economic crisis? After a blip last winter, China is growing at more than 8% a year, and the scale and speed at which the country is building a modern infrastructure are mind-boggling.

But once you’ve absorbed the metrics — the size of its trade surplus, the thousands of miles of high-speed railways, the new ports and highways — a nagging question comes into focus: Sure, China can grow, but can its companies innovate? Can they build products that will compete in the global marketplace?

At first sight, it seems a ridiculous question. China’s universities are turning out hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers; its computing wizards are legendary, and not just because they appear to be among the world’s best hackers and copiers of others’ intellectual property.

Venture capitalists talk about the sheer thrill of watching Chinese startups, saying it reminds them of Silicon Valley in its garage-lab days. Yet it’s worth remembering that China’s recent supercharged economic growth has not been led by innovative private companies. It’s mainly the consequence of a government-directed boom in bank lending, much of it to favored state-owned enterprises.

If you ask management consultants to list the Chinese companies best known and admired in the outside world, many of them would be in basic industry and infrastructure — the oil giants CNOOC and Sinopec, for example.

Don’t get me wrong; many of these businesses are world-class. I routinely get better mobile reception in rural China than I do in New York’s Westchester County and this from a company, China Mobile, that regularly adds 4 million customers to its roster each month. But at least part of the companies’ successes depend on privileged access to capital and their close relationships with China’s power structure.

An illuminating comparison can be found in Japan’s emergence as a global economic power after World War II. Because we’ve become so used to the long Japanese economic stall since its bubble burst in 1989, it’s easy to forget just how extraordinary Japan’s postwar recovery was — and how very different from that seen in China now.

Yes, Japan’s state played a part: The bureaucrats in the powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry tried, with mixed results, to pick winners, and banks shoveled loans to favored corporations. But Japan’s growth was resolutely led by those private companies investing in their own technologies.

One other difference: Many of China’s biggest businesses are buyers of assets overseas — everything from companies to (so it can seem) half of Australia. Japan’s corporate leaders 50 years ago were exporters, not acquirers. It was not just a question of finding new markets outside Japan; much more important, Japan’s postwar leaders understood that if its companies were to succeed, they had to compete with established corporations in the developed world.

That was how their technology, design, marketing, and customer service would become world-class. And so they went out into the world, however hostile it appeared. When Sony (SNE) opened a showroom in Midtown Manhattan in 1962, it was the first time the Japanese flag had flown in New York City since the war.

No analogies are perfect, of course. Maybe we just don’t see China’s most innovative companies because they have no reason to show us their wares. The Sonys, Panasonics, Toshibas, Hondas, and Toyotas had to export, but China’s domestic market is potentially far larger than Japan’s could ever be.

And as a political matter, what counts for China’s leaders is the internal economic development of China, not whether its private companies are world-beaters. A venture capitalist friend of mine talks of China’s enormous raw talent when it comes to innovation and surmises that we don’t see it yet because we don’t understand the Chinese domestic market well enough.

Still, postwar Japan holds a key lesson. It is when local companies are exposed to the gale of competition in international markets that they really develop the innovative products and technologies that can change the world. Will Chinese companies do that? We’ll see.

Michael Elliott is Editor, TIME International.

China, can you innovate? is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Guo Dongjie, the vice president of Ctrip.com, said that the recently-promulgated “View on Accelerating Development of Tourism Industry” has greatly improved the status of the tourism industry in China and it has pointed out the direction for the future development of tourism enterprises. As the leader in the Chinese online travel sector, Ctrip.com will focus more on mass tourism while maintaining its competitive advantages in business travel and the medium and high-end vacation businesses.

Guo also said that Ctrip.com will introduce more diversified tourist routes to meet the needs of different groups of people and will make tourist destinations in more areas inside and outside of China. He compared the move to a change from boutiques and specialty stores to warehouse markets.

Source: China Hospitality News (March 8, 2010)

Ctrip.com Mines The Travel And Vacation Market is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

By Joanne Lee-Young, Vancouver SunMarch 8, 2010There was much official fanfare when, after more than a decade of high-level wrangling, Canada got the nod for so-called approved destination status from China. That was a few months ago.

Now, while the actual bilateral agreement gets hammered out — line by arcane line, privately — B.C.-based tour operators are all a-chatter about how approved destination status (ADS) has played out in the U.S. and Australia, and what they would like to see in Canada’s version.

Technically, the status means that Chinese tour operators and travel agents can organize tours and advertise Canadian destinations. The hope, of course, is for an influx of tourists from China.

But just because they come in larger numbers, finding a money-making model won’t be easy, according to some B.C. tour operators.

For example, they cringe at the latest market gossip from their counterparts in the U.S., which received ADS in 2007.

“It’s been horrible for them. Players there are undercutting and undercutting each other,” to sign up Chinese tourists, said Albert Tseng, owner of NTS International Group, a Richmond travel agency, and president of the Canadian Inbound Tourism Association (Asia-Pacific).

“How much do you think it costs for two to stay overnight in L.A. with hotel, three meals, transportation? Maybe $200 a day? But right now, it’s on for just half that,” said Tseng.

Over at Richmond-based Lion International Travel Service, manager Yan Tai has worse buzz: “We just heard that some outfits on the West Coast are offering hotel, coach and three meals for $38 . . . . We just can’t do that.”

To make up the math on such cutthroat deals, these tour operators take steep commission fees from their suppliers, usually retailers, but also others.

For example, a tour guide will wing a busload of guests through a store and then takes a percentage cut out of whatever the tourists purchase.

The problem is that the math eventually catches up with them. In Australia, which has had ADS since 1999, this practice got so out of hand that the national tourism commission there now keeps tabs on price gouging. Said Tseng: “They are trying to eliminate or reduce this commission shopping. You can get five per cent, that’s reasonable, but not 50 per cent. Imagine if a retailer has to pay 50 per cent commission to get a tour to come through his store, how much does he have to turn around and charge a customer for a bottle of Coke?”

“In the U.S., there was a rush in implementing ADS, so there are not many guidelines … Initially, it was also very chaotic in Australia,” said Tseng. “But by 2005, they were able to assess problems like this, and establish quality [assurance] programs on what’s acceptable.”

One of the other irritants for local tour operators is collecting payment from travel agents in China.

It’s true that ADS will likely make banking transactions such as wire transfers go more smoothly and quickly, but payment terms will still be a thorn specific to dealing with the Chinese market.

“The way our system works and the way it works in other parts of the world is that agents forward payment when passengers depart or before. It’s basically a c.o.d. situation. But China is a little different and sometimes the terms can be dragged out 30 days to 60 days to half a year,” said Tseng, adding that “we shouldn’t have to agree to these business terms at all. It makes it a mess.”

Tai, the manager at Lion International Travel Service, which has locations in Richmond and Burnaby, agrees that collecting money can be a drawn-out process. His company deals with Chinese tourists in many international markets with offices in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the U.S. and Thailand. “We take mainland Chinese tour groups to all these places. The biggest common characteristic is that it’s hard to collect money [from their travel agents]. It’s the same everywhere.”

He’s not sure what the solution could be. “In fact, the business is theirs to give. If you want to be heavy-handed and say you must pay before your group arrives, then, it might not be easy to do business with them. They will choose other companies that give them credit.”

Tony Yin, manager of Vancouver-based 5 Stars Travel, is more optimistic. “Payment is a business negotiation. It’s case by case, depending on the client. Of course, you can get payment up front. People think you can’t, but you can. It depends on the ability of people to negotiate.”

Source: Vancouver Sun (March 8, 2010)

Making money from Chinese tours isn’t easy, agencies say is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Although the final amount of the total consumption has not yet been released, Fetida (费提达), the Tourism Bureau’s executive officer, said: ‘You (Chinese tourists) are very important to our business indeed’ at the welcome dinner in front of 60 tables filled with Chinese tourists. Katz , the director-general of the Empire State Building observation deck, and Perrin, the CEO of Cartier North America, also said, the Chinese customers are growing rapidly and becoming one of the main customers. The growth of the number of Chinese customers is significant especially during the Chinese New Year.

On February 16th, when the Empire State Building invited Consul-General Keyu Peng (彭克玉) for the lightning ceremony, only Chinese guests were invited. Red Lanterns were also hanging in the windows at the entrance in order to let the Chinese customers feel warmly welcomed.
The U.S. official organizer said the reason for the event being supported by the Empire State Building, Macy’s, Cartier and other famous businesses is the recognition of the consumption power of the Chinese tourist.

On February 14th, thousands of Chinese tourists rushed into the prosperous 5th Avenue of New York City during their Chinese New Year Holiday, with all different kinds of Chinese dialects. Some stores were decorated with styles of Chinese New Year Celebration and also presented Asian assistants only to attract more Chinese customers.

Miss Wu, who works in the financial industry in Shanghai, visited Gucci, Fendi and Versace within only a few hours after her arrival to 5th Avenue, and purchased more than a thousand dollars each time in almost every store. With a moderate income as she said, she laughed and said the price of the luxury brands in U.S is cheaper than those in China, with no worry about fake products. As a result, despite the possibility of taxation after returning China, she still seized the opportunity and made generous purchases.

Lizi Zhu (朱黎子), a travel agent of China Travel Service Office with the traveling group said that the spending power of Chinese tourists continue to increase over the years. With the tourism market in Europe and Southeast Asia getting saturated, they show great interest in the United States. ‘And the giant spending power of the Chinese customers usually is reflected on the last day. We will wait and see’.

The Chinese Lunar New Year with its millions of travelers is not only a gala for domestic retail sales, but a feast for overseas retailers, too.

Source: China Decoded (March 1, 2010)

More Than 1,000 Chinese Tourists Head To New York To Celebrate Chinese New Year, Welcomed By Lion Dance At Macy’s

Chinese tourists were invited on an exclusive tour of the Empire State Building to celebrate Chinese New Year in New York (Image courtesy Xinhua)

Last fall, Jing Daily wrote about the increased outreach efforts of retailers like Macy’s to reach out to Chinese — and other free-spending — tourists in New York. From special discount cards to smaller, but similarly appreciated, gestures like multilingual signs, retailers in major American tourist destinations like New York have recognized the huge opportunity that China’s growing ranks of outbound tourists present and have retooled their marketing appropriately.

This week, the efforts of Macy’s and others were apparent, as China’s largest-ever America-bound tour group (numbering around 1,000) hit New York in a Chinese New Year tour organized by Continental Airlines and the New York Galaxy Travel Agency. According to Chinese media, the activities organized by Macy’s were a hit among members of this large tourist contingent. From Huanqiu, via Xinhua (translation by Jing Daily team):

America’s largest retailer, Macy’s, on February 15 received the largest Chinese tour group ever to travel to America, the “Gathering of 1,000.” These tourists took part in a lion dance activity organized by Macy’s to commemorate Chinese New Year and received special shopping cards and gifts in a welcoming ceremony.

These visitors, most of whom are from Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, will stay a total of 8-10 days in the U.S., and their tour will convene in New York during Chinese New Year. In addition to visiting the 100-year-old Macy’s store — which held the lion dance for these tourists — the group enjoyed a special lighting event at the Empire State Building, which was opened up exclusively for Chinese tourists on Chinese New Year. At the event, Chinese Consul General Peng Keyu attended the lighting ceremony, which lit up New York in red and yellow.

It is estimated that the “Gathering of 1,000″ Chinese tourists will contribute roughly $6 million to the U.S. economy in this trip alone.

Naturally, Chinese online opinion about this group of 1,000 free-spending tourists (who apparently spent an average of $6,000 each, if Xinhua’s estimates are correct) is mixed, with the Jiefang Ribao (Liberation Daily) quoting critical netizens and concluding somewhat cooly, “This tourist trip is just a tourist trip. It proves nothing and it changes nothing. Isn’t it overkill to cheer or criticize it?”

Chinese tourists enjoyed a lion dance event at Macy’s this week

While it may be overkill to read too much into this huge tourist group, and it certainly seems overly reactionary to criticize it too much — as Chinese tourists, like anyone else, have the right to spend their money on tourism and shopping if they so choose — New York retailers (and tour operators) definitely have reason to cheer. If the news coming out of Taiwan this week — where the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) has reiterated its desire to attract 3,000 mainland Chinese tourists daily in 2010 for a target of 1 million tourists for the year — is any indication, retailers in Taipei and elsewhere are likely hoping for similar waves of tourists to flood their registers with cash.

Source: Jing Daily (Feb 18, 2010)

Chinese Tourist Spends Thousands Of Dollars Within Hours In The USA is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

The China Observer: You co-authored a report last year that found China will host the world’s fourth-largest number of wealthy households by 2015. Who are China’s luxury consumers? In terms of age dispersion, are luxury consumers relatively younger than their counterparts in developed markets?

Vinay Dixit: We define Chinese wealthy households with an annual income of RMB 250,000 and above. In terms of Purchasing Power Parity, this translates to US$ 67,000 annual income. Please refer to the slide below for ranking of countries in terms of wealthy households.

One key difference of Chinese wealthy consumers when compared to their counterparts from other countries is their youth. On an average, they are about 20 years younger than their cousins in US or Japan. We do expect that the wealthy consumers in China will retain this characteristic in the next decade as well.

The China Observer: The 2009 McKinsey Consumer survey emphasized that companies should no longer assume the existence of a homogenous “China market” and monolithic block of 1.3 billion consumers, adopting a one-size-fits-all China strategy. The survey introduces the “cluster map” approach to China market strategy. How will this alter the business models of foreign luxury companies trying to gain a foothold in China beyond tier-1 cities?

Vinay Dixit: The last decade has seen remarkable changes in China – those relating to consumer evolution, infrastructure development, income levels and consumption patterns, to name a few. Our research (based on 30,000 consumers studied across ~60 cities since 2005) clearly shows that a “city-cluster” framework is fast replacing the “city-tier” approach when it comes to targeting the Chinese consumers.  Several key attitudes are now becoming more and more consistent in a geography of 250-300 km radius around key cities, irrespective of the tier in which these cities are.

This has significant implications in both “where to play” and “how to play” decisions of the companies. It provides significant clues towards choice of geographic areas that companies could prioritize in their launch and expansion plans on one hand, as well as on how to customize their go-to-market strategies in these chosen geographies on the other. Ultimately, we believe that this framework can significantly support a prioritized, sustainable and profitable expansion of a company’s business in China

With respect to luxury consumers, we see significant differences in their profile and attitudes across various cities and regions in China. We introduced the concept of 7 wealthy consumer segments in our last years study – even within the tier-1 markets of Beijing and Shanghai, we see significant differences in composition of the wealthy consumers. The differences in other tiers and geographies are even starker.

Source: McKinsey Insight China (March 5, 2010)

Luxury Consumer Culture in China: Inside Observer Interview with McKinsey & Company is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Sex is definitely the universal theme for Chinese websites, from the major portals to small sites. It is very interesting to compare a US portal with a Chinese portal site to see the difference on this topic. It happens Yahoo is a good example for this since Yahoo has a Chinese Yahoo (Yahoo China) and it is comparable to other major Chinese portals, such as Sina.com.

There is no sex on the front page of Yahoo at all. You basically don’t see any ads or words related to sex. This is pretty much the standard for all major US portals.

But the Chinese Yahoo (or other Chinese portal sites) is totally a different animal.The following picture is the top part of the front page of Chinese Yahoo on Oct. 31, 2005. All the pink-marked sections are related to sex. Here are some of the titles (mostly ads): “Two Sexes”, “Male and Female Valuable Book, the Final Station of Sexual Happiness”, “Happy Contraception, Making Love at Ease”, “Nuclear Weapon of Sexual Happiness for Men”.

More Sex on Chinese Yahoo

The following picture is from the middle section of the front page of Chinese Yahoo on Oct. 31, 2005. Again the pink-marked sections are related to sex. Here are some of the titles and ads: “Oomph Forum”, “Parking and Making Love”,”The Night with Viagra”.

Yahoo Is Not Alone

Chinese Yahoo is not the only site having a lot of sexual contents on the front page. Sex is more or less the theme for the other major Chinese portals. Even the famous Xinhua News Agency has promoted the Playboy contest on its website (see the picture below).

The question is why is so much sex on Chinese websites. The Chinese government apparently has not done anything to control it. The Chinese Women’s Associations don’t care about it either. China does not have a strong religious network and most Chinese do not have a strong bond with a religion anyway so religions are not going to help much on this. However, sex is a big money maker for Chinese websites since most of the sexual titles are ads and it attracts more people to the sites.

I don’t know if Chinese people are bothered by all of the sexual contents on the Net. But sex is part of people’s life after all as Confucius once said.

Source: About.com

China’s obsession with Sex Online is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Baidu.com:

Baidu (百度) is the Chinese Google. It dominates Chinese language search with about an 80% market share and is one of the biggest sites worldwide. As a local Chinese site it censors it’s search results. Like Google, Baidu offers a number of services apart from search, including Maps, documents, MP3 search, Baidu Space (a social network with over 100 million users) Baidu Encyclopedia, (China’s largest encyclopedia by users) and is launching a new video site called QiYi.com in March.

QQ.com

QQ is a portal that runs a number of services, most notably its IM service with over 1 billion registered users and it’s social networking service Qzone, which some claim is bigger than Facebook.

Kaixin001.com:

Kaixin001 (开心网) is one China’s fastest growing Social networking sites (SNS) with 75 million users. It claims to be growing at a rate of 100,000 to 200,000 new user registrations per day Essentially a Facebook clone with applications, gaming, groups and pages.

Renren.com

Renren.com (人人网)is another social networking site similar to Facebook. and is a fierce rival of Kaixin001. Renren.com claims to have 120 million registered users. It mainly caters for college students, though it is actively looking to expand its reach.

Youku.com

Youku  (优酷) was ranked #1 in Chinese Internet video sector in January 2010. Users can upload videos of any length and it’s library includes many full length, popular films and TV episodes from the West as well as Chinese content. It’s main rival is Tudou.com

Tudou.com:

Tudou (土豆网) is a video-sharing site and competes directly with Youku.com. Like Youku, users can upload videos of any length. Tudou serves over 100 million videos each day with more than 40,000 new videos published daily.

Tianya.cn:

Tianya (天涯)  portrays itself as the “King of the Chinese Internet community”. Certainly it’s BBS message boards are the most active in China. Every issue under the sun is debated, argued and posted here. Many Chinese internet memes start here and replies to posts can run into the thousands. More than 33 million people across China regularly visit the Tianya forum.

Taobao.com

Taobao (淘宝网) is the Chinese Ebay. It is China’s largest Internet retail platform , taking up about three-fourths of the market share. Nearly 50% of all Chinese Internet users are registered on Taobao. Alibaba’s Jack Ma has said: “eBay may be a shark in the ocean, but I am a crocodile in the Yangtze River. If we fight in the ocean, we lose—but if we fight in the river, we win.”

Douban.com

Douban (豆瓣)  is a popular Chinese social media site ( ranked 24th in China) with over 30 million unique users a month. It started about five years ago and has all the now common features of social media sites such as groups, the ability to “friend” others, etc.Douban users tend to be between 20-35 years old and single. Mostly into arts, films, music and culture. The CEO of the site Ah Bei claims that: “Douban has never been an SNS site; it has a community or social networking community. Perhaps it’s a social network based on books, or  on movies, but Douban is broader than that.”

Douban has recently had a redesign, which adopts a Facebook style feed on the frontpage.

Sina.com.cn

Sina (新浪) is reportedly China’s largest “infotainment” portal and is third in terms of Traffic Rank within China, behind Baidu and QQ. Sina is popular for news, but also for it’s blogs, which are some of the most read in the world. It recently launched a microblogging service (like Twitter) t.sina.com.cn. which has proved extremely popular (now the largest micro-blogging site in China) and is growing at a tremendous rate.

Source: RenMedia (March 4, 2010)

10 Important Chinese Websites is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Picture a social network user. Once upon a time it was easy – they were pimply teens huddled in messy bedrooms. Or young professionals organising their social lives. These days, however, they’re becoming far harder to categorise.

Last year Facebook reported huge growth in the 25 to 54 age group. After a feverish year of growth for social networks in Asia, are there similar signs of a broadening demographic?

Generally, the answer is yes. Figures from Synovate (see below) point to more older consumers engaging with social networks.

Kevin Huang, CEO of Pixel Media, which has worked with online firms including Facebook, agrees that the over-35s are now growing quickly on social networks, especially in sophisticated markets such as Hong Kong and Singapore.

“How many times have you recently heard one of your friends say, ‘Wow, my dad’s just gone on Facebook?’” says Huang. “We’re also seeing [older users on] Windows Live Messenger as well as boards like Discuss and Uwants in Hong Kong. Twitter also seems to appeal to a slightly older crowd.”

Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific director of 360 digital influence at Ogilvy PR, agrees there has been a change. “This demographic shift takes place along the lines of internet penetration, which should not be confused with the number of broadband connections. Indonesia, in particular, has lately had a boom of women joining the social internet world via BlackBerry.”

An interesting exception appears to be Japan, according to Adrian Roche, digital lead at OgilvyOne Japan. There, the leading network is Mixi, and Roche says that its user base is still youth-driven. “We still have a dominant user base in the 18 to 34 age range. The 35 to 49 age range comes in second place, but this is a distant second place. The age range of 50-plus doesn’t yet exist.”

Unsurprisingly, market leaders elsewhere are broadening their target demographics in line with the change. Facebook, the global leader and now a significant force in Southeast Asia, is built around personal relationships regardless of age. In China, meanwhile, leading network Xiaonei rebranded as Renren last year to reflect its broadening user base: Xiaonei means ‘on campus’, a reflection of the network’s student origins; Renren simply means ‘everybody’.

Other networks, left in the shade by the leaders, are relying on a more focused approach. Globally, MySpace has recently sought to turn itself around by focusing on entertainment, so far with limited success.

In Southeast Asia, Friendster was the leading network for several years before being widely usurped by Facebook last year. Ian Stewart, head of Asia at Friendster, points out that, unlike the US, the vast majority of internet users in its key markets are young – around 80 per cent are under 40 in the Philippines and Indonesia. So despite growth among older users, the young demographic is still core.

For that reason, Friendster is sticking with a youth positioning. “For Friendster we remain committed to our focus on being the social network for youth and their friends, and thus act as a gateway for brands wanting to connect with a younger demographic online,” he says.

Nevertheless, he admits that older users will “offer opportunities in the future”. For advertisers, a broader demographic on social networks opens up a whole new way of engaging consumers for brands with a more ‘grown-up’ audience. Crampton points to the cosmetics market as an early example of a sector that has had to respond to social media’s advance – many blogs and communities have arisen to discuss brands in the sector.

Lawrence Wan, general manager of OMG Digital in China, agrees, pointing to Chinese campaigns by brands such as Ponds and Neutrogena, which have put networks at the heart of their communications strategy. “Next is to leverage best practices to brands targeting a more mature female audience, where beauty and cosmetic brands are increasingly finding it difficult to differentiate,” he says. “The battle is starting to move from a heavily TV-driven awareness model to a multi-media model driving engagement and socialising, with SNS increasingly proving to be an integral channel in that strategy.”

The widening appeal of social networks

> In January 2009 Facebook reported that its 35 to 54 user base had grown 276.4 per cent in just six months.

> According to Synovate’s 2009 PAX study of Asia’s upmarket consumers, around 70 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds use social networks, a figure unchanged from 2008. However, among 35- to 39-year-olds, the figure rose from 59 per cent to 65 per cent, and among 40- to 44-year-olds it rose from 54 per cent to 62 per cent.

> In China, according to iResearch, the 35-plus user base of social network users has doubled year on year since 2007 to well over 30 million users. The biggest driver of that growth is Kaixin001, which has the highest reach of 35-plus users.

Source: Asia Media (March 4, 2010)

Social networking is expanding its reach into the 35+ market and beyond is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Broward and Palm Beach counties are working with state tourism agency Visit Florida to lure Chinese tourists, providing materials for travel trade shows in China and welcoming delegations of Chinese travel agents and press to help spread the word about what South Florida offers.

On a recent Friday, a group of eight Chinese travel writers visited Fort Lauderdale, taking a water taxi tour, shopping on Las Olas Boulevard, as well as sampling shrimp and steak at Shula’s on the Beach restaurant, escorted by staff from the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Accompanying the group: Vicky Miao, a Chinese marketer who works for Visit Florida in Shanghai. She touts the state to the estimated 300 million people in China’s middle- and upper-income groups who might consider an overseas trip.

“We’re really enjoying the sunshine here. It’s cold in Shanghai and Beijing now,” Miao said.

Another Chinese visitor marveled at the unusual hand-crafted mask from South America she bought on Las Olas and dreamed of the lifestyle in the waterfront mansions that she passed on the water taxi.

“If I had a lot of money, I could live there. I’d feel like a movie star,” said Grace Zhong, an editor at Voyage, a top travel magazine.

Chinese travel abroad is rising, as China’s economy surges.

This year, the number of Chinese visiting the United States is forecast to jump 15 percent to 556,000, rising faster than any other major source nation though still comprising less than 1 percent of total foreign arrivals to the country, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

By 2020, the number of Chinese traveling abroad to all nations is set to double to 100 million a year, making China the No. 4 source of tourists to the world after Germany, Japan and the United States, according to the World Tourism Organization.

Visit Florida is taking the lead in marketing the state to the Chinese, participating in travel shows in China and distributing materials in Mandarin that showcase separate Florida counties.

The Palm Beach County Convention and Visitors Bureau collaborated on one recent promotion, and so, was able to hand out local information in Mandarin to visiting Chinese travel writers when they recently toured the Flagler Museum, said bureau spokesman Kenneth Morgan.

Hotels keen on international guests also are eyeing China. But Walter Banks, owner of Fort Lauderdale’s Lago Mar Resort & Club, said he’s inclined to work initially through the tourism bureau and Visit Florida to reach Chinese travelers – not market directly in China on his own.

“It’s always good to start working on new markets ever so gradually,” Banks said.

Just how many Chinese now visit Florida is not known, but the number may be approaching 10 percent of those traveling to the states – which could mean maybe 50,000 this year, said Bruce Bommarito, executive vice president of the U.S. Travel Association and a China travel specialist.

Florida focuses international marketing on Europe and Latin America, regions that long have been staples for Florida tourism.

But the state is increasing China efforts, leveraging Florida International University’s 4-year-old hospitality program in Tianjin that trains Chinese students, annual meetings that bring together tourism chiefs from U.S. states and Chinese provinces and a growing push from Miami that started in 2006.

Bill Talbert, president of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, has been attending annual travel shows in China and arranged for Chinese groups to film in Miami, including a beauty pageant from Hong Kong. He’s now working on ways to improve Miami’s airline connections with China.

This spring, when the U.S. Travel Association holds its annual Pow Wow trade show showcasing U.S. travel, Chinese TV crews will film the show in Orlando.

“The potential is tremendous for Florida,” Bommarito said.

He cited a recent survey in China that asked people where’d they’d go if money and visas were no concern. The United States came out tops, edging out Paris, he said. “And when they visit the United States, they’re already looking for new destinations. They’re saying “OK, we saw California. We saw New York. Now, let’s look at Florida.”

•About 50 million Chinese now travel overseas a year and 100 million will in 2020.

•China will rank as the No. 4 source of tourists to the world after Germany, Japan and the United States by 2020.

•Chinese visiting the United States tend to start with Hawaii or California; then go to New York or Las Vegas; before coming to Florida.

•Chinese visitors to the United States now spend more on average than any other international visitor: about $6,000 for a three-week trip.

•Travel companies or visitor bureaus seeking to lure Chinese should consider using Mandarin for Web sites, signage and restaurant menus.

•Sources: World Tourism Organization, U.S. Commerce Dept., U.S. Travel Association.

Source: Tampa Online (March 6, 2010)

Florida hoping to lure tourists from China is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

More positively, the government’s efforts to increase domestic tourism appear to have paid off, compensating to some extent for the downturn in foreign arrivals. Domestic tourist visits rose by an impressive 15% y-o-y, to 1.9bn in 2009, while domestic tourism revenues rose to US$185bn, a 9% yearon- year (y-o-y) increase. Although some of this domestic tourism boom was forced by the fact that more people could not afford to leave the country, it marks a positive development and means that the tourism industry has not suffered a major slowdown during the 2008-2009 economic downturn. Moreover, with foreign tourist arrivals picking up again towards the end of 2009, we expect arrivals to continue recovering in 2010, albeit minimally, and we forecast arrivals of 126.8mn.

Hainan Province Tipped For Development In early 2010, the government announced plans to develop the southern province of Hainan as a national and regional tourism centre. The province is in fact an archipelago of approximately 200 islands, although the main population and tourist infrastructure is found on Hainan Island. The island’s southern location and warm climate makes it ideal as a tourist destination, although it has largely been a location for domestic tourism so far. The government aims to change this by developing it as a site for international tourism and in particular by opening up its gaming industry. Given that several neighbouring countries, such as South Korea, prohibit gambling, this would position Hainan as a regional gambling hub, in a similar way to the special administrative region (SAR) of Macau. The government will also introduce a tax-free scheme system on Hainan Island, encouraging its development as a location for shopping visits.

Cruise Sector Builds On Potential Amid the general slowdown in 2009, China’s developing cruise sector performed well, with 156 cruise vessels arriving in Chinese ports, with passenger arrivals of 380,000. Although the industry began to grow in the 1970s, it only began to gain momentum in 2005 when Chinese nationals were first permitted to board cruises stopping in other countries. Cruises are becoming one of the fastest growing sectors of domestic tourism, with the number of Chinese passengers rising from 10,000 in 2005 to 110,000 in 2008.

Although China still lags behind the rest of the region in terms of cruise infrastructure, the industry’s potential is encouraging towns to upgrade their facilities. Sixteen of China’s 23 main ports now have cruise terminals. Tianjin will open a terminal in late 2010 and construction will begin at Dalian this year.

China Tourism Report Q2 2010 Published by CNTA is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

The Chinese Lunar New Year is not only a gala for domestic retail sales, but a feast for overseas retailers, too.

Some 1,200 Chinese tourists celebrated the lunar New Year in New York between Feb 14 and 20, spending an estimated $6 million in the United States, said Zheng Wenqing, a public relations manager for New York Tourism Board’s China office.

Japanese retailers also reaped gains from Chinese tourists during the week. A local home appliance retailer, Bic Camera, reported that its store in Akihabara, Tokyo, saw its sales increase by 20 to 30 percent thanks to Chinese tourists, Japan-based Chinese language newspaper Jnocnews reported.

The newspaper quoted a salesman as saying that a Chinese tourist pointed to and bought cameras and lenses worth more than 70,000 yuan ($10,500) at one time. Another Chinese tourist bought 20 rice cookers at one shot.

In Berlin, half of eight counters selling luxury watches in KaDeWe department store on Feb 15 were receiving Chinese tourists, Xiao Yun, a tourist who just came back from Europe told Beijing Youth Daily.

He also saw the counters of top cosmetic brands crowded by Chinese tourists at the Munich airport, and one of them bought five bottles of a toning lotion priced at 2,000 yuan each.

Chinese consumers have become the No 1 spender in more and more countries, studies and experts said.

The latest report by Global Refund, a company specializing in tax-free shopping for tourists, said Chinese tourists outspent the Russians in France last year. Chinese tourists spent 155 million euros ($220.2 million) in 2009, followed by the Russians who spent 112 million euros and the Japanese who spent 99 million euros, the report said.

The Galleries Lafayette in Paris reported that a typical Chinese tourist spent 1,000 euro in two hours last year, topping tourists from other countries.

Some 87 percent of the Chinese’s average total bill was on fashion items, including shoes and handbags, and 93 percent of their shopping was done in and around the French capital.

Purchases made by the Chinese represented 15 percent of total spending by tourists in France in 2009 and their total bill rose 47 percent from 2008, it said.

Chinese tourists are also among the top five spenders in countries like Singapore and South Korea, reports said.

Insiders said the shopping craze is mainly due to two reasons – a booming economy in China, and a price gap caused by a high tax levied on luxury goods.

“People have more spare money to spend now. I traveled to France a decade ago, and I didn’t buy any luxury goods simply because I couldn’t afford them,” said Cui Xiaoping, in his 50s, who traveled around Europe, including France, with his wife in January.

But during the January trip, he bought so many things, including designer handbags and clothes, that he needed to buy an extra suitcase to carry them home.

“Chinese people these days are more informed about the luxury brands. For me, I buy luxury brands because they offer quality. Buying them in Europe is a lot cheaper than in China due to the competitive exchange rate between euros and renminbi, plus there is no import tax,” he said.

In addition, Chinese tourists are impulsive shoppers, said Li Meng, deputy general manager of the outbound department with the China International Travel Service head office.

“Chinese tourists are different from the Japanese tourists, who would make shopping lists beforehand. Many Chinese tourists bought everything they thought is cheaper than at home,” he said.

Source: China.org.cn (February 25, 2010)

Chinese tourists spend lots of money abroad is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Total revenues at eLong.com for the fourth quarter increased 18% year-on-year to CNY106.9 million and net revenues increased 18% year-on-year to CNY100.9 million. Operating income in the fourth quarter was CNY2.4 million compared to operating loss of CNY10.3 million in the prior year period. Net income in the fourth quarter was CNY1.0 million compared to net loss of CNY8.2 million in the prior year period.

Total revenues in 2009 increased 9% year-on-year to CNY379.5 million and net revenues increased 9% year-on-year to CNY357.9 million. Net income in 2009 was CNY19.9 million compared to net loss of CNY76.6 million in the prior year.

“The China State Council has made the travel industry a priority sector of the Chinese economy, which we believe improves the opportunities for eLong. Starting in 2010, we have quickened the pace of our product and service expansion and upgrades,” stated Guangfu Cui, CEO of eLong. “We launched dynamic packages, so that consumers can book hotel rooms and air tickets together as a package in order to save time and money. We have now contracted more than 10,000 domestic hotels and also offer over 100,000 hotels worldwide by connecting to Expedia, making eLong the largest online distributor in China in terms of hotels offered. And we upgraded our online international air booking technology in order to make booking international tickets on eLong as easy as booking domestic tickets.”

eLong currently expects net revenues for the first quarter of 2010 to be within the range of CNY 86 million to CNY93 million, equal to an increase of 10% to 20% compared to the first quarter of 2009.

Source: China Tech News (March 4, 2010)

Chinese Internet Travel Revenue Increases For eLong.com is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

The slowdown of economy growth negatively affected the tourism, leading to the slowdown of growth rate, even negative growth, especially in entry tourism market, exit tourism market and hotel industry etc. By contrast, domestic tourism market and scenic resorts were less influenced by the slowdown of economy growth

With the spread of international financial crisis, the unfavorable influences had clearly showed in Chinese tourism.

In 2008, the market scale of Chinese online tourism market was only about 500 million USD, however, its annual growth speed reached to 50%. Because the total demands for the abroad tourism market declined, the cost pressure for online tourism providers accelerated. Chinese online tourist enterprises reduced the investment in advertisement and marketing so as to maintain their finance.

Chinese online tourism is obsessed by two problems: incapable of product standardization and risks in payment. Facing the fierce competitions, the tourist booking websites will take more consideration in the newer services and broader marketing channels in order to find their market in various categories.

For example, a new online tourist model-trip search is springing up, such as www.qunar.com., which had already entered Chinese online tourism market.

Under the international financial crisis, it is predicted that online tourist booking services will gradually permeate into traditional tourist market, even expand the services by the establishment of travel agents. Meanwhile, traditional travel agents will provide online tourist booking services for their customers. From a long run, the integrators will be the winners in the future. The integration of online and offline services for customers will possibly dominate the market. With the revenue reduction of booking market in the market share, the tourist products will become the fastest growth business in online tourist booking market. Besides, providing online tourist route will be the transfer direction for online tourist websites.

Source: China Research & Intelligence

Chinese Tourism Industry under 2009 Financial Crisis is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

If you’re in an industry that markets to the Chinese; whether it’s consumers, tourists, business to business or the public sector, you could be missing out on a huge potential audience.

Here are our top 10 reasons for embracing Chinese social media:

1) China has about 400 million internet users. Never mind all the Chinese speakers that live in other countries.

2) 92% of Chinese netizens use Social Media.

3) Every social media user owns on average 2.78 social media accounts

4) “But, we already use Twitter.” Newsflash! The Chinese government doesn’t like Twitter, and blocks it. Good luck marketing yourself in China if that’s your only strategy.

5) “We’ve got a Facebook Page” Also blocked.

6) Oh and by the way, you thought Facebook was big? QQ has one billion registered accounts and 500 million monthly active users.

7) 233 million mobile internet users

About 50 Million outbound tourists travelled out of China last year. 7/10 Chinese Travellers use the internet to source information about their destination.

9) 50% of netizens blog.

10) “I’m already ranked on Google.” Heard of Baidu? It beats Google hands down in China. Last year’s earnings were a 42% improvement on 2008 and it has at least a 75% market share.

Source: Ren Media (February 23, 2010)

And a few more thoughts on the not-to-distant future of social media in China.

1. Social media will predominate the digital landscape in China
2. Digital becomes a gateway into and across the Chinese social media networks
3. Digital will be measured by its effectiveness to influence, contribute, and add value to social media
4. All leading brands will adopt a Chinese social media strategy or they will loose relevance
5. All agencies will build dedicated Chinese social media teams
6. Social media will become the nexus for most digital strategies
7. Social media will not be seen as a tactical or executional issue but a primary strategic issue

Chinese Social Media Value Chain

The value chain in Chinese social media is the same as everywhere.

Social media introduces a new communication model into the media mix.
This model still consists of standard attributes:

• Audience
• Participation
• Value
• Opportunities
• Threats
• Timeline

Critical elements in this new model are audience focused, and relate to relationships, participation, and value – this is the value chain in social media. Out of this value chain come opportunities and threats, and of course all of these elements are framed within a life cycle along a time line.

Bring Gifts, Not Sales People

So when you think about unlocking the value chain in social media you must put your audience front and center, enable and contribute value through helping to create and sustain this value chain.  In short, when opening doors into social media try bringing gifts not sales people.

Source: Digital China Guide

Top 10 reasons why your business should use Chinese social media is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Google has been widely celebrated for its loud refusal to continue censoring its search results in China. It is still unclear whether Google will continue to operate in China (note: Google is hiring in China), but in any event we are not about to see much change in China’s internet policy. More likely, all this “foreign meddling” will merely cause the Chinese government to dig in its heels.

Even if Google does ultimately leave China, the game is not over. Western companies can promote internet freedom from the outside, by providing useful technology as well as the keys to access it. Call this “Twitter diplomacy”.

Twitter is largely blocked by China’s “great firewall” (GFW), which prevents Chinese people from accessing certain sites. Yet Twitter has an almost religious following among tech-savvy Chinese, whose determination to use the service outstrips authorities’ efforts to block access to it.

These “netizens” surmount the firewall by way of proxy servers or virtual private networks (VPNs) that allow them to browse the web as if they were outside China. Earlier this month, Chinese twitterati helped get the GFW on to the list of Twitter’s top 10 “trending topics” (or most tweeted terms) – an impressive feat given that Twitter is supposed to be inaccessible in China.

Twitter, which lets people send bite-size messages to large groups, allows the Chinese to quickly disseminate urgent news or even uncomfortable facts. “Twitter can create a faster information flow than any official agency,” says Michael Anti, a journalist in Beijing who has long been at the forefront of the Chinese internet movement. “That means people would get information faster than the government. That’s a real crisis for Communists.”

Twitter also helps protect individual citizens. Blogger Peter Guo claims that Twitter got him out of jail. He says he was arrested after spreading word about a crime that allegedly involved local officials. He tweeted an SOS via his mobile phone after he was arrested last July, and his case quickly attracted both domestic and international attention, which helped secure his release a little over two weeks later.

So just imagine if Twitter were available to the larger Chinese population. The problem is that many Chinese still lack the simple tools that would enable them to get past the GFW.

When I asked Guo how the outside world could make Twitter more accessible in China, he replied that we could help by “providing affordable VPN service”. Foreign companies, he added, could make available more secure browsers that would help “Chinese people to circumvent the GFW”.

Government can also play a role in empowering Chinese netizens. Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has suggested that the US, for example, could start with some basic funding for the kind of “science and technology innovation that gave us the internet to begin with”. This could include potential “game changers” in China such as ad hoc mesh networking, which allows users to communicate with one another by hopping from one device to the next without an internet service provider in the middle.

But, given the political sensitivities of foreign pressure on China, it is unclear how far western governments will be able to go. That is where companies like Twitter come in.

Even if Twitter’s co-founders did not necessarily develop it to be a tool of democratisation, that is precisely what it has become. In April 2009, young people in Moldova used Twitter to organise protests against their government. Two months later, Twitter famously helped Iranians assemble and share information during their election protests.

Now, we are beginning to see a similar phenomenon in China. In November, citizen protests against the construction of an incinerator in Guangzhou became a widely tweeted event. Referring to protests in Iran and Moldova, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told me: “These are all events and movements that people chose to make happen, and Twitter was a tool that happened to be there to make it more easy.”

Twitter may now be taking more aggressive steps to promote internet freedom abroad. Co-founder and CEO Evan Williams recently suggested that software developers were working on technology to evade government barriers, though he did not give specific details.

Google’s adamant stance on Chinese censorship may have been well-intentioned. The problem is that the standoff has now taken on the tone of a state-to-state confrontation. China, apparently still reeling from a “century of humiliation” at the hands of outsiders, will not be pushed around by America. This view is not limited to the Chinese government. Right now, many netizens are applauding Google’s move. But if they begin to perceive Google as a pawn of the US government, this sentiment could turn on a dime.

Ultimately the Chinese internet cat-and-mouse game will be won with innovation, not political pressure. The world should continue to flood the Chinese market, and those of other countries that restrict freedom of expression, with cutting-edge technology. Of course, censors will often be just one step behind, filtering information and shutting down sites. But Chinese netizens are remarkably adept at using the limited tools available to them. In doing so, they are transforming their country in a slow but irreversible way.

Source: Guardian UK (March 1, 2010)

And here is an interesting article from China Youren about the anticipated fate of Google Buzz:

NOTE: For those readers who’ve been offline for the past 3 days, this is a post about Google Buzz, the new Google service that has invaded the World’s mailboxes this week.

But take it easy, hold on a sec, don’t rush to your GFWtest tools, this has not happened yet. I just want to be the first to announce it and get all the credit, since I am 90% certain that Google Buzz will be blocked within a week. The remaining 10% I am hedging in case the GFW censors get too high on Baiju over the New Years and their reactions are a bit slower than expected.

Look, I hate playing blogger of doom, but this is just how China works today. I’ve heard a few opposed opinions from bloggers I respect, and I am ascribing that to wishful thinking. There is no way Google Buzz is going to continue open, here is why:

• Gbuzz is attracting very fast a larger number of users than Twitter or Facebook in China, due to its use of Gmail, a relatively popular email service here.

• The viral transmission potential of Google Buzz is extraordinary, and very appealing for the Chinese way of using the internet. In the first 24 hours of GBuzz in China the popular Chinese bloggers where getting far more comments than pioneers like Robert Scoble.

• After their recent controversy with the Chinese authorities, Google put Gmail (and now GBuzz) on HTTPS, which means that the GFW cannot  see the content flowing inside China. They cannot block particular users or keywords, and neither can they force a self-censorship of Google as they did with the Google.cn, for reasons both technical and political for the Google company.

So what we have here is a means of massive viral communication, completely out of control and with a potential to piss off the Chinese authorities that may be second only to the Epoch Times.

A Real-time Simulation

For those who still don’t agree with me, I have used my old engineering supercomputer to do a real-time simulation of the upcoming events, starting from yesterday, when most Chinese Gmail users got access to GBuzz. The first 4 steps have already happened as of February 12:

Step1: GBuzz is rolled out in China and within hours the popular bloggers are getting streams of comments in the few hundreds. One of the first subjects of discussion is whether the Buzz will be blocked or not.

Step2: Some Chinese users start timidly testing the system with unmodified swearwords and taboos, such as Caonima and Malagebi. Euphoria: no comments are deleted or blocked!

Step3: - After 12h some Chinese users are already sending pictures of beautiful ladies with a peculiar tendency to wear less and less clothes even as the winter is hitting back hard on the mainland.

Step 4: Bloggers like Han Han or AiWeiwei discover GBuzz and start broadcasting there. Not only their posts, but worst still, the flow of comments is out of reach of the Chinese authorities. Comment threads are by now in the tens of thousands.

Step 5: The next big viral event hits the Chinese internet, and seeing that all comments get erased on the other blogs and microblogs, even more people starts flocking to GBuzz.

Step 6: By now most netizens have understood that GBuzz is their GFW free day out. Uncensored photos of Edison Chen or drunken party cadres recirculate widely, people even write appraisals of the performances. More than 50% of the words on GBuzz worldwide are in mandarin characters, and about 10% of them are some form of 妈/逼 word construction (mother /cunt).

Step 7: The early days of FOS were rather hectic, but the people finally realizes the advantages of communicating freely. The divide between the Chinese internet and the rest of the world is disappearing quickly, and Google Buzz has written a page in World history.

… in the meantime, somewhere in the middle kingdom…

… the evil 5Mao teams of netizens sold to the the party have caught up with GBuzz and are calling their bosses in the propaganda department to wake up from their baijiu dreams and show up at the GFW headquarters with red tape and pruning shears…

Conclusion

OK, I think you get the gist by now. And the conclusion is this: there is no way GBuzz is going to remain open in China. The only question remaining to answer is what will happen to the rest of the Google services, in particular Gmail and Google.com (G.cn is already doomed in my books).

I see here 2 possibilities:

1- Google Buzz could technically be blocked without blocking GMail, in spite of their integration. The GFW could achieve this by using intelligent URL blocks on the #buzz string that appears on all the buzz URLs. Easier still, since they are in negotiation with Google, they could ask G to facilitate the blocking of GBuzz in exchange for GMail remaining open.

2- GBuzz might go down and take down with it all the Google services in China once and for all. Especially this can be true if the negotiations between Google and the Chinese government are not as smooth as I supposed lately. This has happened already in Iran, and I am certain most leaders in the CCP wouldn’t even  blink. Or does anyone think they care about the outside opinion on China’s freedom of speech?

So this is only a 2-way dilemma, I don’t see any other solution. The final outcome of the Google vs. China affair is coming very soon, precipitated by the unexpected birth of GBuzz. Neither Google nor the CCP can afford to wait much longer, as the pressure is mounting on both sides. The end is near, fasten your belts and turn on your VPNs.

One other example how the Chinese netizens are getting around the Chinese Internet Censorship is by developing their own language – as an example below, the 10 Mythical creatures.

10 Mythical Creatures

The Baidu 10 Mythical Creatures (simplified Chinese: 百度十大神兽; traditional Chinese: 百度十大神獸; pinyin: bǎidù shí dà shénshòu), alternatively Ten Baidu Deities, was initially a humorous hoax from the interactive encyclopedia Baidu Baike which became a popular and widespread internet meme in the People’s Republic of China.^[1][2]

These hoaxes, ten in number, originated in response to increasingly pervasive and draconian online censorship in China, and have become an icon of citizens’ resistance to censorship.

Arising in early 2009 ^[5], the meme initially began as a series of vandalised contributions to Baidu Baike ^[6], through the creation of humorous articles describing a series of fictional creatures, with each animal with names vaguely referring to Chinese profanities (utilizing homophones and characters using different tones).^[7] Eventually, images, videos (such as faux-documentaries) and even a song regarding aspects of the meme were released. ^[8] It was thought that the Baidu hoaxes were written in response to recent strict enforcements of keyword filters in China, introduced in 2009, which attempted to eliminate all forms of profanity ^[9][10]. The Baidu Baike “articles” initially began with “Four Mythical Creatures” (The “Grass Mud Horse”, “French-Croatian Squid”, “Small Elegant Butterfly” and “Chrysanthemum Silkworms”), and were later extended to ten.

The memes became widely discussed on Chinese Internet forums, and most netizens concluded that the initial aim of the hoaxes were to satirise and ridicule the pointlessness of the new keyword filters. The meme is interpreted by most Chinese online as a form of direct protest rather than motiveless intentional disruption to Baidu services.^[11] After the hoaxes were posted, news of the articles spread quickly online on joke websites, popular web portals and forums ^[12][13] such as Baidu Tieba, while a large number of posts were sent on the Tencent QQ Groups chat service. There have also been various parodies of the meme created (such as the “Baidu 10 Legendary Weapons” ^[14] and “Baidu 10 Secret Delicacies” ^[15][16]). Meme references can be found throughout Chinese websites ^[17].

The 10 Mythical Creatures

The mythical creatures have names which are innocuous in written Chinese, but sound similar to and recognizable as profanities when spoken. References to the creatures, particularly the Grass Mud Horse, are widely used as symbolic defiance of the widespread Internet censorship in China; censorship itself is symbolized by the river crab, a homophone of “harmony” (a euphemism for censorship in reference to the Harmonious Society).^[3]

Cao Ni Ma

A depiction of a “Cao Ni Horse”.

Cao Ni Ma (草泥马), literally “Grass Mud Horse”, was supposedly a species of alpaca. The name is derived from cào nǐ mā (肏你妈), which translates to “fuck your mother”. Note that the comparison with the “animal” name is not an actual homophone, but rather the two terms have the same consonants and vowels with different tones, which are represented by different characters. Their greatest enemy are “river crabs” (河蟹, héxiè, resembles 和谐 héxié meaning “harmony”, referring to government censorship to create a “harmonious society”, while noting that river crabs are depicted wearing three wristwatches, vaguely referring to the Three Represents, where 代表 “represent” and 戴表 “to wear a watch” are homophones), and are said to be frequently seen in combat against these crabs.

Videos of songs^[18][19], as well as “documentaries” about “Grass Mud Horse” started appearing on Youtube and elsewhere on the internet.^[20][21] The video scored some 1.4 million hits; a cartoon attracted a quarter million more views; a nature documentary on its habits received 180,000 more.^[3]

The “Grass Mud Horse” became widely known on the English-language web following the 11 March 2009 publication of a New York Times article on the phenomenon,^[3] sparking widespread discussion on blogs, and even attempts to create “Grass Mud Horse” themed merchandise, such as plush dolls^[22].

Fa Ke You

Fa Ke You (法克鱿), literally “French-Croatian Squid” (with the name derived from the direct Chinese transliteration of “fuck you” in English), was supposedly a species of squid discovered simultaneously by France (法国) and Croatia (克罗地亚), hence the name “Fa Ke You”. The Baidu Baike article claims ^[23] that “Fa Ke You” is a species of invertebrate, aggressive squid found in Europe. When agitated, it is said that they release a form of “white-coloured liquid”. These squids are said to cause great harm to humans when attacked. When some of these squids reached East Asia, it is said that they became hunted, and eaten with corn. Such a dish is known as yù mǐ fǎ kè yóu (玉米法克鱿, “Corn French-Croatian Squid”, referring to the fans of Li Yuchun, dubbed “corns”), being one of the world’s top five greatest delicacies. An alternate name for the dish in question is 非主流的法克鱿 (fēi zhǔ liú de fǎ kè yóu, “Non-mainstream French-Croatian Squid”). This is apparently due to the behaviour of these squids, which do not inhabit major rivers, or the “main stream” of a river system, thus scientists dubbing them as squids with “deviant behaviour”.

Ya Mie Die

Ya Mie Die (雅蠛蝶), literally “Small Elegant Butterfly” (name derived from Japanese yamete (止めて), meaning “stop”, a reference to rape scenes and common conceptions and stereotypes Chinese display towards the Japanese in regards to pornography and erotomania), was supposedly a type of butterfly discovered on 1 January 2009 at the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, and that legends state that there was once a Japanese girl who turned into these butterflies after harsh pressures during a romantic relationship. ^[24] These butterflies are able to change colour, and are luminescent, naturally emitting light from its wings. This is due to the cold temperatures and low oxygen environment these butterflies live in. There are an estimated 14,000 butterflies living throughout the world, and thus are considered to be precious and highly uncommon.

Ju Hua Can

Ju Hua Can (菊花蚕), literally “Chrysanthemum Silkworms” (referring to Intestinal worms, where the term “Chrysanthemums” (júhuā) is vulgar slang which refers to the anus). This referred to Chrysanthemum Terrace, a song by Jay Chou, where the lyrics “菊花残，满地伤” (Chrysanthemums scattered, fill the floor with wounds) are re-rendered with homophones and similar sounds as “菊花蚕，满腚伤” (“Chrysanthemum(Anus)” worms, buttocks covered with wounds). Ju Hua Can can also be interpreted as a pun on another homophone, 菊花残, meaning “broken chrysanthemum”, which would be slang for a “broken anus”, referring to (possibly painful) anal sex, as 残 is a homophone meaning “broken”. Such a phrase implies hopelessness, as once a person is given a “broken anus”, they would find difficulty in sitting down, and so “broken Chrysanthemum” is a common (vulgar) Chinese idiom. These silkworms are said to feed on chrysanthemum flowers rather than mulberry leaves (from the article). ^[25] The article also states that the usage of Chrysanthemum Silkworms dates back to 3000 years ago in Ancient China, and that they were the first cultivation method of silk obtained by early scientists. The silk produced by silkworms that feed on chrysanthemums rather than mulberry are able to be produced at a much faster rate, are higher in mass, are fireproof, protective against ionizing radiation, bulletproof, and lightweight. However, these silkworms are very difficult to maintain, and easily die. They are vulnerable to cold, heat, and are susceptible to changes in humidity, and thus are very costly to nurture. Noblewomen from ancient times are said to pay large sums of money for such types of silk.

Chun Ge

Chun Ge (鹑鸽), literally “Quail Pigeon” is a homophone with 春哥 (Big Brother Chun). This species of bird is apparently found only in Sichuan and Hunan; formerly found in the area that is now the Republic of Yemen. ^[26]

The term “Big Brother Chun” (春哥 has been used to refer to the female singer Li Yuchun due to her apparent androgynous appearance. “Yemen” comes from the catchphrase chūn gē chún yé men (春哥纯爷们), meaning “Brother Chun is all man” — 爷, meaning “grandfather”, can also be read as “masculine” (young males in Northeast China use the slang term 爷 as a personal pronoun in an impolite context). The 春 Chun can also refer to fa chun (发春), which is slang for sexual arousal – literally “Spring has come”.

Ji Ba Mao

Ji Ba Mao (吉跋猫), literally “Lucky Journey Cat” (a homophone with 鸡巴毛, referring to pubic hair, as the homophone jība (鸡巴) translates to “penis”, while the definiton of 毛 máo is “hair” or “fur”.) The original article states that this cat lives in dark, damp environments and competes for food with the White Tiger (white tiger is a slang term for a woman’s shaved pubic area). Additionally, the Ji Ba Mao flourished during the reign of the Zhengde Emperor. ^[27]

Wei Shen Jing

Wei Shen Jing (尾申鲸), literally “Stretch-Tailed Whale” (a homophone with 卫生巾, referring to menstrual pads). From the Baidu Baike article, it was discovered by Zheng He during his maritime adventures, this creature was hunted for clothing material to manufacture women’s lingerie. ^[28]

Yin Dao Yan

Yin Dao Yan (吟稻雁), literally “Singing Field Goose” (a homophone with 阴道炎, meaning a Vaginitis infection). From the article on Yin Dao Yan, in the Kangxi era, a large goose dove into a certain field, damaging it and causing the local farmers to come down with a strange sickness. ^[29]

Da Fei Ji

Da Fei Ji (达菲鸡), literally “Intelligent Fragrant Chicken” (a homophone with 打飞机, slang for masturbation while literally meaning “hit the aeroplane”). According to the original article, Da Fei Ji is a species of bird that likes exercise, and the males use neck spasms and spit out a white secretion to impress females during mating seasons.^[30]

Qian Lie Xie

Qian Lie Xie (潜烈蟹), literally “Hidden Fiery Crab”, closely resembles qián liè xiàn (前列腺), which translates to prostate glands. According to the article, this is a legendary crab that once stopped up the Grand Canal (referring to the urinary tract). ^[31]

China can’t control the net for ever is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Xiamen was ranked 4^th in the list of top 10 tourist arrival cities in China, according to Ctrip.com, a leading travel portal in China.

The top 10 tourist arrival cities were Beijing, Hong Kong, Sanya, Xiamen, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Hangzhou and Nanjing. These cities generally have the characteristics of established tourism destinations: beautiful natural sceneries, rich cultural resources, convenient shopping and developed tourism-supporting facilities.

Xiamen and Sanya have both seen a marked increase in number of tourists this Spring Festival. The hotel prices in Sanya have seen a skyrocket while the hotel occupancy rate has reached 90% in Xiamen.

The final rankings was concluded by expert team from Ctrip.com, after they conducted a comprehensive study of the reservation status of hotels, air tickets and tourism products in China’s major cities and tourist destinations, and combined with Web browsing and internet searching results.

In addition, Ctrip.com has also unveiled the top 10 outbound tourist destinations during the Golden Week holiday, which were Hong Kong, Phuket, Bali, Seoul, Singapore, Phnom Penh, the Maldives, Tokyo, Taipei and Osaka.

Top Tourism Destinations during Chinese New Years holidays is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Douban, a Chinese social networking service website, received $10 million in venture capital from its second round of fundraising on January 25, after raising $2 million in 2006. Photo: CFP

He couldn’t take it anymore.

When Hong Kong writer and poet Liao Weitang found his online photo album had been deleted by douban.com, he quit, leaving behind the 3,000 friends he had made over two years.

“I had a great time here,” he wrote in his leaving statement to users of the Chinese mainland social networking service, “despite my account twice being suspended and having 100 posts deleted.

“But just lately this website has gone insane. It’s like half of the 5,000 most-commonly-used words are banned.”

The final straw for Liao was the deletion of The Beautiful and Strong People, an album featuring Hong Kong youths and artists involved in a protest against the HK$66.7-billion Hong Kong to Shenzhen and Guangzhou high-speed rail link. Photos of kneeling, barefoot youths were apparently deemed too political.

“I shot beautiful young faces, nothing radical or provocative,” Liao said. “But they just couldn’t let it go.”

“I stuck it out for two years with Douban, posting poems and comments, trying to bring a little truth and alternative values to my friends behind the Great Firewall.

“But I’ve got to have a bottom line somewhere. The Web master repeatedly tested my principles. So finally I decided to leave this website that is becoming renowned for self-castration.”

Douban used to be more flexible with him back in the old days, Liao said. For example instead of deleting, website managers might close off content by making it “private” not public. Or entries were not erased immediately, perhaps after a day or two, he recalled.

“That way, hundreds and thousands would see them,” he said.

As one of only a few Kong Hong writers willing to operate in this compromised Internet environment, Liao said he had savored the opportunity to communicate with isolated mainland friends.

“I posted on Douban what the public needs to know, saving more personal stuff for my blog.”

Initiated in 2005, Douban has 33 million registered users: mostly students and intellectuals who enjoy the social networking service’s simple design and user-generated content like books, movies and albums. More recently, Douban’s tightening censorship has upset some veteran members.

It got to the point that Peking University student Fang Kecheng wrote an open letter of complaint to Douban for suspending his account, dubbing the website a “dictator”.

According to Fang, users and Web masters had been forced into playing hide-and-seek with Big River, Big Sea – Untold Stories of 1949, a banned book by Taiwan writer Lung Yingtai.

As the book’s International Standard Book Number (ISBN) was forbidden on the mainland, users kept the title but altered the ISBN in order to share their comments and ratings.

Douban’s Web masters spotted the incorrect ISBN, erased the title and re-inserted the original, correct title. Seeing this, Fang changed the title back again, which led to his account being closed.

“I can’t believe contributing entry content can be a crime,” Fang said. “Any user can submit information they think is right on a website that relies on user-generated content.”

Fang wanted to find out whether the book’s sensitivity had contributed to his punishment and so he got his friend to change the title back again. His friend’s account was also closed.

It wasn’t the censorship per se that enraged Fang and other Web users, it was Douban breaching its own published code of conduct.

“Douban’s ban is unreasonable and random,” Fang wrote. “It’s authoritarian because you can be banned for three days, seven days or forever with no justification and all your diaries, albums, collections and messages are gone.”

Douban’s rules state users must receive three warnings before such a final, permanent closure: After a first warning, the account is suspended three days. The second warning leads to a week’s ban. Only after a third warning is the account supposed to be closed down permanently.

Fang’s open letter led to the lifting of a closure on his account.

Commercial survival

Self-censorship is the rule of survival that prevents popular websites from being shut down, Zoe Wang, a veteran website developer told the Global Times.

“I can understand an author being outraged when his post gets deleted, but it’s even harder to operate a website as I have to suffer the humiliation of supervisory organs and handle all the criticisms coming from users,” she said.

“How can you hope to pay your staff or maintain your users’ statistics if the website is shut down all because of one sensitive post?”

“You can never relax,” said the small website operator.

“You’re always keeping your phone switched on and waiting for that emergency call from the authorities requiring deletion of a post.”

What’s worse, she said, was the complete absence of clear-cut rules for deciding whether or not to delete an online post.

“The criterion of sensitivity depends on many aspects such as the political environment, the website’s background, size and location, as well as the different understandings of Web masters.”

Douban was extraordinarily cautious about its content as it had no background or ties to government, according to a source close to an editor at the site.

“Once you’re shut down, nobody can save you,” the source said.

No editor from Douban would go on the record when the Global Times contacted them.

“Douban recalls clearly the fate of Fanfou, Yeeyan and Blogbus,” Fang said.

They were three of the most well-known mainland websites closed down last year, according to the Southern Metropolis Weekly. The latter two were recovered in January.

Fanfou founder Wang Xing was pondering how much to up censorship during the July 5Xinjiang riot last year when he got his answer.

The Twitter-style microblogging service for 100,000 registered users was closed down almost immediately for “violating related rules”, according to the China Business News Weekly.

Wang hasn’t given up hope of bringing Fanfou back some day. Seven months on, Wang still refused to comment.

A site that published collaborative user-submitted translations of English and Chinese articles, Yeeyan was shut down in November last year for violating the regulation on “running a news information service”.

According to this national regulation, any organization applying for the establishment of an Internet news information service on the Chinese mainland must have registered capital of no less than 10 million yuan and at least five Chinese mainland editors who have engaged in journalism for longer than three years.

Yeeyan relaunched 39 days later under tight self-censorship, with all “political” news removed.

“It was difficult to figure out what we can say and what we cannot,” Chen Haozhi, founder of Yeeyan, told the Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend.

The most devastating issue for translators was finding so much of their hard work deleted, said a former volunteer.

“It wasn’t our fault because we couldn’t twist the original meaning of the news stories,” she said.

“I’ve got absolutely no idea what is sensitive and what is not.”

Admittedly, she said, they knew their work was “risky” as “most foreign news about China is negative”.

Yeeyan’s partnership with the Guardian newspaper had made the staff especially proud, the translator said.

“The website attracted many readers as it helped them bypass the two walls,” she said. “Most Chinese face two obstacles: the Great Firewall and the language barrier.”

Neutering was the only option for Yeeyan if they wanted to continue in business, she said.

Yeeyan was also bound by copyright law, she said. The translation company had to delete a group translation of Dan Brown’s blockbuster The Lost Symbol and apologize to the book’s Chinese publisher last year.

No appeal

Aside from suffering censorship or shutdowns for reasons unknown, a common complaint among Internet users and website operators is the lack of an appeal.

“You can only go to related departments and beg them to give you another chance,” Liao said.

As the Web master of an online poetry forum, Liao has a list of sensitive words he received from the local Internet authority.

“They hope we will delete posts containing these words,” he said, “but I don’t see it making much sense.”

The forum was shut down twice last year.

“We have no idea why,” he said. “It came all of a sudden.”

In response, the site’s server was moved to Hong Kong.

“It’s impossible to rescue your website if you violated the related law,” a Web master from China Unicom, Beijing branch, told the Global Times.

“As long as Douban is growing, it won’t care about what users say because the real threat comes from the authorities,” Fang said.

It’s pointless fighting the system, he said.

“We can only fight the slavish social environment and gradually gain a sense of citizenship,” he said.

Vague laws

There are 14 general laws and regulations governing illegal online behavior, all vague and lacking in detailed, practical provisions, according to Li Yonggang, a professor of Internet politics from Nan-jing University, in his newly published book Our Great Firewall: Expression and Governance in the Era of the Internet.

“As a result, it’s difficult to draw a line when operators and Web users censor, apart from the well-known restricted field of political issues,” he wrote.

There are more than 10 government organs entitled to supervise the Internet, Li said. This inevitably gives rise to conflicts, he believed.

Bans are also increasingly unpredictable, he said. Recipients receive no explanation and no comeback. Chinese mainland Web users tend to react with a pessimistic, alienated and impotent attitude.

“Chinese may criticize the evils of society, but at the same time they feel like participants,” Li said.

“In fact the Great Firewall is rooted in our hearts as so little ‘harmful information’ will ever come to light thanks to individuals’ self-discipline and website operators’ self-censorship.”

Online opinion is a double-edged sword, said Wang, also a bulletin board moderator. Irrational online outcries aren’t helping anyone, she argued. She cited the online petition for Sun Zhigang, famously beaten to death in 2003 for not carrying a temporary living permit.

Observers attributed the ending of the policy of custody and repatriation to online public sentiment. In fact, Wang said, the change of policy came about because of the SARS breakout.

“They were all eager to sign a petition when something happened but in fact it only led to the shutting down of these significant forums.

“We can’t stop censorship, but we can articulate the truth with a more rational attitude. When different opinions coexist, people find their own answers.”

Censorship is also necessary to prevent certain kinds of harm being done to others, argued Zhu Wei, a professor at China University of Politics and Laws in Beijing.

“The nude picture scandal wouldn’t have run out of control if there was no Internet,” he said. “Unrestricted, freedom can lead to violence.”

According to the newly-passed Tort Liability Law, any Web user or service provider who infringes upon the civil rights and benefits of another is liable.

This new catch-all is a valuable control over online opinion. According to Article 36, the infringed party can inform the Web service provider to delete, shield or cut the links as well as any other necessary measures.

“The Web service provider who doesn’t take necessary measures after receiving this information will bear joint liability along with the Web user,” the law states.

Source: Global Times China (February 2010)

Publish and be deleted – extensive Internet controls in China is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online

Chinese luxury shoppers typically prefer upscale shopping malls to all-in-one department stores, as Shanghai’s Plaza 66 attests (Image via Flickr)

Last week, Jing Daily translated an article about Chinese tourists outspending Japanese 2-to-1 at a number of famous South Korean department stores. According to that article, visitors from mainland China now account for more sales than ever at some of Seoul’s most fashionable and expensive stores, and it’s not unknown for one-day tourists to drop hundreds of thousands of dollars in one shopping spree. As we’ve noted before, Chinese tourists taking cross-border shopping trips is far from unique to Korea, however, and two of the biggest beneficiaries of the outbound shopping boom have been some of the mainland’s closest neighbors — the Chinese special administrative regions of Macau and Hong Kong.

Macau, which is known more for its casinos than its malls, is relatively new to the Chinese shopping-tourist itinerary, but over the past few years the city has seen a surprising amount of construction, both of independent luxury boutiques and malls — all of which are built with mainland tourists in mind. Hong Kong, however, has been something of a playground for the mainland’s wealthy elite for quite some time, as the city’s cosmopolitan luxury infrastructure was well in place by the time China’s economy began its dramatic growth in the early 1990s. Over the past 20 years, the trickle of wealthy mainlanders escaping high import taxes by hopping across the border for duty-free shopping sprees in Hong Kong has become a deluge — much to the enjoyment of Hong Kong retailers and luxury brands from around the world.

As a recent South China Morning Post article points out, an interesting byproduct of more mainland shoppers throwing their weight around in Hong Kong has been the gradual decline of traditional Hong Kong department stores in favor of luxury outlets and smaller upscale malls. Although this may not sound like much of a story in itself, it does show how Chinese tourists are no longer following global trends in some parts of the world — they’re setting them. From the article (via Guanyu):

Traditional department stores, which once boomed in the city, have faced major challenges following the rise of shopping malls and people’s changed shopping habits.

The hordes of mainland tourists that descend on the city every week are particularly fond of the famous brand outlets, located at malls such as Times Square and Pacific Place.

It was not always so. A weekend trip to a department store such as Sincere or Wing On was a must for most Hong Kong families up until the 1990s. Children could shop for toys, fathers for ties and shirts while mothers could get everything from handbags to kitchen utensils.

Local department stores first faced serious competition in the 1980s from Japanese rivals. Then a more ominous trend emerged, with the rise of shopping malls. Over the past two decades the number of local department stores has dropped to only a few survivors. Malls have all the “under one roof” convenience of a department store with the added attraction of name-brand outlets. Beijing resident You Xiaojia, a regular shopper in Hong Kong, is familiar with most major retail areas in the city. She and her husband visit at least once a year to purchase clothes, accessaries and cosmetics.

But like most mainland tourists, her itinerary is usually filled with visits to shopping malls. Traditional department stores are seldom on the “to do” list.

…

You’s attitude is typical of mainland shoppers, who have been the main driver of the city’s retail industry over recent years. That means department stores are benefiting less than shopping malls from the customer inflow across the border.

From 2004 to 2008, the total floor space of the city’s shopping malls increased by 1.7 million square feet on average every year, with new mega shopping centres rising one after another.

It is interesting to see how mainland trends — e.g., the construction of and preference for shopping malls rather than “one-stop-shop” department stores — is having a spillover effect in Hong Kong and, ostensibly, Macau. Although Macau never had as many department stores to begin with as Hong Kong, a quick drive around Macau indicates how much influence mainland tourists and businesspeople are having on the city’s construction and commerce going forward.

Source: Jing Daily (March 1, 2010)

Mainland Chinese Shoppers Changing Hong Kong Retail Landscape is a post from: China Travel Trends-Reaching the Chinese Travel Market Online