The People’s Republic of WeChat

One of the first lessons you learn as a foreign correspondent is the unreliability of first impressions. If you’re not careful, you will spend an entire visit to a new country freeing yourself from the seductive cliches you succumbed to in the first few hours.

This was on my mind as I arrived in Beijing for the first time. To break free of my jet-lag, I set off from my plush hotel for a brief gander through the Central Business District, joining a parade of hip youngsters as they wandered past the global emblems of aspiration: Prada, Gucci, Ritz-Carlton, Chanel, Maybach and the slightly less aspirational Costa.

Above us were blue skies, not Beijing’s signature smog, which had been miraculously banished just in time for the summit of APEC leaders. Among young Beijingers, ‘APEC Blue’ had become a catch-all description for anything transitory and unreliable, such as a commitment-phobic boyfriend or perhaps a foreigner’s first impressions.

The next morning, the APEC summit dominated the front-pages of state newspapers. However, regular Chinese folk were talking about something else. The number one trending topic on social network Sina Weibo that morning was the celebration of Singles’ Day, a manufactured holiday honoring those struggling to find true love. November 11th was chosen because the characters 11.11 resembles “bare branches”, the Chinese expression for bachelors and spinsters.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba copyrighted the “Double 11” term in 2012 and transformed the holiday into a national carnival of consumerism. This year, Singles’ Day generated billions of dollars in sales for Ali Baba and broke global records for online commerce.

Singles’ Day bolstered my first impressions of China’s affluence but also made me question assumptions about Chinese aspirations. The allure of a Western lifestyle is not the driving force of social change, nor is the disciplined edict of state capitalism. The raw energy of Chinese society flows through a virtual nexus of connections and commerce into a vast online empire hidden to the rest of the world.

I was in Beijing at the invitation of one of China’s web giants, Tencent. Part content creator, part mobile platform, part gaming business, part e-commerce hub, it’s a company that defies easy comparison.

Over dinner with Tencent staffers, I listened to the story of the explosive growth of its social messaging service WeChat. The app had 195 users in early 2013. By the end of the second quarter of this year it had 438 million.

As I was taken on a tour of WeChat’s features, I was struck by the addictive clutter of voice and video chats, group conversations, innovative friend-finder features and highly effective QR codes. An online payment system powers a frenetic marketplace, offering everything from limitless emojis to taxi hire.

A relentless focus on mobile has been a key driver of WeChat’s growth. There are an estimated 700 million smart phones in China, pushing online services into the outer reaches of this vast nation. The state news outlet Xinhua recently reported that cattle herders in the Inner Mongolia region were using WeChat to advertise the sale of their livestock (and find missing animals!!).

China’s online pioneers walk a different path to their counterparts in Silicon Valley. Engineering challenges are far less important than monetising human needs and desires. Technology is much less important than the behaviour it helps scale. This difference doesn’t just apply to the Tencent team. On a visit to China’s other dominant web empire, Sina Weibo, I was told by a top executive: “We are a social service as much as a social network”.

The relentless spread of China’s social service platforms has been turbocharged by the backing of a cash-rich technology sector. China’s leading phone manufacturer Xiaomi is responsible for the spread of connectivity but also a billion-dollar bet on social video platform YouKu, matching similar investments by other Chinese tech companies like Alibaba.

Without doubt, the stars have aligned in perfect harmony for China’s social media empires. It’s hard to see commercial limits to their growth, save high bandwidth costs and the potential saturation of an insanely competitive social marketplace.

However, the gargantuan elephant in the room for China’s social networks is the specter of censorship and the “Great Firewall” that separates Chinese netizens from the rest of the world.

In August, the State Internet Information Office issued a 10-point document tightening control of instant messaging services. Only approved news organizations could post political news or “current affairs”. Apps like WeChat must promote the “healthy and orderly development of public information services … and safeguard national security and public interests.” WeChat users were urged to respect the “socialist system”, public order and social morality, among other officially-sanctioned objectives

The release of the new guidelines focused renewed attention on the cat-and-mouse game played out on social networks every day. During the APEC summit, for example, state broadcaster CCTV broadcast a chivalrous but suggestive encounter between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Chinese First Lady Peng Liyuan. “Putin has just placed his coat around Peng Liyuan’s body,” the commentator announced. Video of the incident created a frenetic conversation on Chinese social media channels such as Weibo, where it generated its own hashtage: “Putin Gives Peng Liyuan His Coat”. But the hint of impropriety inflamed state censors and within hours they had the video removed from news sites and erased related conversation from social media sites.

However, despite the shadow cast by Big Brother in China’s vast social space, an unstoppable and infectious wave of focussed curiosity is burrowing underneath the wall of repression.

As I struggled to find a connection to g-mail, the friendly hotel IT ‘concierge’ was bemused that I hadn’t already circumvented the official ban with a VPN. As I talked with the connected Chinese, I heard no burning desire to commune with the rest of the world through anything but their own home-grown networks.

There is no apparent focus on the internet as a tool of dissent, at least not in its broad Western sense. Public debate takes place within a very narrow spectrum but it is perhaps fiercer and more impactful because of that. In debates around corruption, police misconduct and official neglect, social networks have become a channel for populist outrage and a source of offline action and opportunity.

Citizens without faith in the forces of law and order have found recourse in the forensic power of the social web. A deepening reservoir of digital information has helped private investigators to expose fraud and corruption. “The days of searching through press cuttings in dusty archives are long gone,” reports US risk consultancy Kroll. “Now, social media is a key resource for any investigator”. It often seems this muck-racking is sanctioned and encourage by the central government, as it battles official misconduct by party officials, but it is no less radical and courageous for it.

I was honored to present an award at the Online Media Awards, sponsored by Tencent. You could hear barbed references from speakers to a “difficult year” but there was also evidence of rude health in Chinese investigative journalism. Winning entries focused on issues ranging from educational inequality to official wrong-doing, and displayed a keen understanding of the social web as both a tool of investigation and mass distribution.

The overall winner this year was a takedown of China’s former security tsar Zhou Yongkang by the independent financial publication Caixin. His downfall was clearly engineered by leading elements of the party hierarchy, but the level of detail gathered, visualised and mapped by Caixin was stunning.

Social media has allowed hundreds of millions of connected Chinese to build their own version of civil society. It clearly exists within the strict parameters of official edict, and perhaps at its whim, and yet it has evolved into a parallel dimension where risk has its reward.

“Internet users have learned to live with the ambiguity and take their chances,” wrote one Chinese academic in a recent edition of Caixin. “The sword of Damocles hanging over their heads has not prevented them from trying new things”.

Chinese social media users may not enjoy the chaotic, unchained freedoms the rest of the world has come to know, and love (and fear). But they are trying new things that will almost certainly have a global impact, and may even change our understanding of the phrase ‘social network’. The new emperors of China’s social space have understood that the rise of the internet is not a technological revolution but a cultural one. The winners will be those who focus on the service the social web can deliver to a wide variety of communities, not engineers obsessed with universal product features.

Tencent recently revealed that WeChat has 100 million registered users outside China. Well, 100 million and one. I ran out of business cards during my visit to China, and ended up using WeChat to connect with every new friend I met (engaging in a surprisingly intimate exercise of scanning our respective QRs).

When I got home I showed the app to my daughter, who was fascinated with the colour and emotion it could bring to an instant message. Ten minutes later, a What’s App ‘moment” appeared on my phone. My daughter pulling a funny face followed by a dancing horse and an ironic “Hello father”.

So much for the great firewall of China.