What’s life like on the Chinese internet?

A series exploring the world of Chinese apps and the Chinese tech industry

Most people are aware that a Great Firewall separates the netizens of China from the rest of the world and that services like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter aren’t available there. What’s less known is that behind the Wall is a cyberspace hot-house where a surging consumer culture and a torrent of entrepreneurial energy have made a parallel universe internet whose broad outlines are familiar to us, but whose details can be lost in translation.

As of 2016, the Chinese internet is as sophisticated as the one the rest of the world knows, and in many respects is more complex and full of novel ideas for human interaction and commerce. It’s time for those of us on the outside to take note. Not only to study emerging business models that we can adapt, but to deepen our understanding of how a big slice of humanity is experiencing the seismic effects of technological change. The Chinese internet is like the other side of a giant A/B test. What can we learn?

The ocean that separates us

Of the top 100 App Store apps, the U.S. and China share only two in common — Uber and iTunes U, the educational app from Apple. By comparison, the US shares 56 apps in common with Canada and 41 apps in common with France. In other East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, the overlap with the US is also very low. This tells us that in addition to the Great Firewall, cultural and linguistic barriers also contribute to the uniqueness of the Chinese internet.

How many of these apps do you recognize? These are iQiyi, Didi, Weixin, Taobao, Zhifubao, Momo, Weibo, Leshi, and Eleme. The more avid tech followers amongst you may know a few of these. To the rest — it could be time to brush up on your pinyin. These apps and others form the basis of modern life for hundreds of million of Chinese. Each has a rough analogy with an app we know. iQiyi and Leshi are like Netflix; Didi is like Uber; Momo, like Tinder. But the analogies are imperfect and the consumer landscape they’ve grown up in is undergoing such upheaval that we can learn a lot about Chinese society just by noting the paths they’ve taken and where they’re headed.

The promise of the internet has always been to reduce the distances that separate us. When we Skype, we can feel we’re in the same room as a friend on the other side of the planet. Yet the internet is also increasingly the way we experience the world around us. We see life through the lens of the internet whenever we look at pictures of our friends, read reviews of places to eat, make a purchase, or hail a ride.

If we all use the same apps, we experience the world in a similar way. Even if my feed is filled with different people than yours, we look at the world from the same vantage point. And it certainly feels like a small world when people in France and in Indonesia follow the same Instagram accounts as we do.

As time has gone on though, the noble ideals that propelled the internet in its infancy have given way to political and economic realities. Data is increasingly siloed and treated as valuable property. Power structures are reinforced rather than bulldozed. And the utopian creed of “open and free” seems more naive than ever. There’s nowhere where these truths find earthly form more than the development of the Chinese internet.

My wish is that by giving you a glimpse of what life teems behind the curtain of the Chinese internet, I can do my part to offset these cold realities.

I also want to give another take on China, which is mostly negative news about its government, economy, or geopolitical situation. We can learn more about China and Chinese people from these apps than we ever could from reading stories from major news organizations.

Exploration

So, how will we get to know the online world eight hundred million Chinese smartphone users? Many of my posts will introduce individual apps and give context about how consumers use those apps and how the companies operate. I’ll include try to include videos so you can really get a good sense of how the apps work. I also plan on translating some articles and book chapters so you can get a deeper sense of how the Chinese themselves think about the booming tech industry. And the rest will be interesting observations I’ve made as somebody who pays regular visits to that part of cyberspace.

As a disclaimer, I don’t live in China, so my observations are that of an interested outsider. I use WeChat and a few other Chinese media apps, but I’m not able to use many of the on-demand economy apps since those require IRL interaction. For those, I’ll fill in the gaps with what journalists and industry analysts say.

Find all the posts in this series below:

1. Catching a tune on China’s most popular karaoke app
2. How Taobao combines Amazon, eBay, Buzzfeed, Instagram, and Periscope to make the world’s most advanced e-commerce app
3. LeEco: China’s Netflix sets its sights on Hollywood and the American consumer
4. China Goes Crazy for Live Streaming (Video)
5. Chinese Smartphones Wars (Video)