China’s internet is flourishing inside the wall
China’s internet is flourishing inside the wall
The country shows how censorship coexists with vibrant
ecommerce and entertainment
By John Gapper NOVEMBER 23, 2016
In Beijing’s old hutong alleyway districts, an inner wall
faces the door to every courtyard house. The wall is there to stop bad spirits
from entering the inner sanctum.
China’s internet has a similar design to its courtyard
houses. The way is blocked to foreigners such as Google and, despite Mark
Zuckerberg’s efforts, Facebook while Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent, the largest
Chinese internet enterprises, have prime spaces. Cyber space is walled and
divided.
A few years ago, China’s government seemed to be in
conflict with the very nature of the internet, struggling to censor bloggers
with millions of followers on Weibo, the Twitter-like service. Since then, it
has shown that censorship can coexist with a vibrant online culture, as
ecommerce and entertainment have taken over from political debate and the
sharing of sensitive information.
Deng Xiaoping, its former leader, pioneered “socialism
with Chinese characteristics”, the blend of market-oriented enterprise with
central control that has underpinned its development. President Xi Jinping now
has an internet with Chinese characteristics.
Visiting China last week, just after its annual November
11 Singles Day online sales spree, which this year attracted $17.8bn of orders,
I was struck by how quickly its digital economy has evolved. We look to the US
for online innovation but China has plenty of its own.
WeChat, the mobile messaging and ecommerce app owned by
Tencent, is the most recent. Smartphones have spread fast, with 620m of China’s
688m internet users owning mobile devices, and WeChat has overtaken Weibo as
its leading online network.
That is partly because it emerged at the right time.
WeChat was launched five years ago and grew as the government cracked down on
the use of Weibo as a tool for political dissent. In 2013, the stars of Weibo
were netizens who drew attention to corruption and abuses of power, leading to
a crackdown on the spreading of “online rumours”.
WeChat evaded the purge by being more private. It places
an upper limit of 500 on the number of people in a group chat. Political and
academic dissidents who could no longer share their criticisms with millions
transferred from Weibo to WeChat, where they can converse in smaller circles.
Political debate has thus moved from the virtual
equivalent of Tiananmen Square to private courtyards. The limits on freedom of
expression undermine Chinese people’s ability to exchange information
uncensored and unmediated, which is one of the internet’s benefits. But the
compromise on censorship has unleashed innovation that has brought economic
gains.
WeChat is more than a messaging network for users with
controversial views: that is only a tiny aspect of its appeal. It carries a
wide array of services for its Chinese users, many more than messaging apps
such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger. It can be used for everything from
hailing cabs, ordering food deliveries and buying cinema tickets to booking
doctors’ appointments.
It is an ecommerce platform as much as a messaging app,
with users able to pay for goods and services through its WeChat Pay service.
“WeChat is like an operating system for China,” says Connie Chan, a partner at
the US venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “You can get through an entire
day online without going outside it.”
China lags behind mature markets in the US and Europe in
the quality of physical shops and availability of branded goods. This has
opened a gap that is being filled by apps such as WeChat and by Alibaba, the
leading online marketplace. Ecommerce is likely to account for 18 per cent of
retail sales in China this year, compared with about 8 per cent in the US.
Health scares and lack of quality controls have led
Chinese shoppers to distrust the goods in their stores. They can now buy global
brands on WeChat from JD.com, the online retailer, and have them delivered,
often on the same day, by one of its couriers. They have been liberated by
ecommerce.
China’s internet has also become an entertainment medium.
This is exemplified by Weibo, which dipped in popularity after the crackdown on
political bloggers but has revived after being adopted by celebrities and
aspiring celebrities to build personal brands and sell products. VIP bloggers
now offer their millions of followers entertainment, not political insight.
Entertainment is often blended with ecommerce as with
Singles Day, which Alibaba adopted in 2009 and has since turned into a sales
extravaganza that easily outstrips this month’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday
in the US. The build-up to the day includes online fashion shows and celebrity
performances to encourage a sales frenzy.
There is something impressive in all of this. In a short
time, China has become not only the world’s biggest ecommerce market but also
an innovator in mobile services. Its companies mix messaging, payments and
online retailing better than any US rival.
There is also something sad. China’s government has
improved the material lives of citizens and brought them economic benefits
while curbing their right to free speech. This is China’s internet, not the one
outside the wall.
john.gapper@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2016. All rights
reserved.
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