China and the World Map of the Internet
Written by Julen Madariaga on December 4th, 2009I was tinkering with some statistics last night, considering that strange idea of the Insularity of the Chinese Internet that we’ve been discussing lately. The expression itself is odd, because “internet” and “insularity” form an oxymoron, but you hardly notice these things when you live here. It’s normal routine in the land of socialist market economy.
Whatever we make of the phrase, the fact is that it comes up every time, whether we are speaking of language, media or politics, all seems to point in that direction. The pictures below are my attempt to draw a World Map of the Internet to illustrate this insularity, using the data from the site Internet World Stats.
Here is the first idea I had: I got the statistics of all countries with more than 10 Million internet users, that makes 32 in total, from China to Morocco. Then I did an Excel chart where each bubble has an area proportional to the internet users of the country, and crucially, I filled the bubbles with code from the Matrix. Result: the World Map of the Matrix:
The World Map of the Internet Matrix
One interesting thing in the map above is that Asia is already the largest internet area in the World. Amazing—but not really, after all, it has by far the largest population. And this is nothing compared to what is coming: with the growth of India and China the internet is going to be an Asian joint in the next few years. No hit will be really global on the net without them. Up to now, most people on the net were from developed countries, from now on the majority will be from developing ones. The close contact between our societies will have important consequences online and off. That is, supposing we really manage to connect.
But when we speak of the internet, it doesn’t make much sense to look at political boundaries. There is no such a thing as border controls online, what really unites or divides the peoples is culture. An in particular, the most important parameter is language: regardless of your national origin, what defines you as an user is the language you surf in. That is the reason why my browsing habits look more like this blogger’s than like anyone in my country: ESWN and I have completely different backgrounds, but we have in common our surfing languages.
So I looked up the statistics of the 10 most used languages on the internet, from English to Korean. This time I coloured the bubbles with flags, and I placed them roughly on the center of gravity of their community of speakers. The result is the map of Surfing Languages:
The World Map of the Surfing Languages
Still, the map is not great. Many of the speakers in the massive English bubble are actually Indians, Spanish should be both in America and in Europe, and Australia is completely out of the picture. Physical distance has no meaning on the net, even less than political boundaries. It becomes clear that geography is of little use for my purpose, so we might as well dump Gmaps and stick to the bubbles.
My new diagram looks like this, where all the major internet communities are represented together in a Cloud. We are all interconnected, and the only solid differentiator is language. Two people might share a hobby, like soccer , but they don’t go to the same websites if they surf in different languages. Most of the media and resources on the internet are not translated into other languages, but rather re-written and re-interpreted by native bloggers/journalists, who function as border control among the communities.
Improved World Map of the Internet: the Cloud
One of the things we see on the Cloud is that all the communities are touching each other. But I’m afraid this is not a very precise picture. Normally Russians don’t translate Japanese content, neither do Portuguese translate Arabic. The English language has a crucial role on the internet today, because in most cases it is through English that the rest of the languages communicate: Most content is translated first to English and from there to the other communities. The English bubble, including users from all over the World, is the Center of the Internet.
Another problem with the Cloud is that it shows all the communities equally interconnected, which is not very realistic. Users who speak European languages are much more likely to read English. The Spanish community, for example, includes many Americans who surf English sites as much as their own language. Actually, most of the language bubbles share a significant part of their pixels with the English bubble, so we can represent the Map as a sort of Venn diagram:
Second Iteration: the Venn Diagram Map
We see the new Map is very different from the previous one. Now there is a cluster of Western languages that share a lot of content with English, two more languages that share a bit, Russian and Arabic, and then the three languages that form the core of the Asian internet today: Chinese, Korean and Japanese. And you may have noticed that I have drawn Chinese at a distance from the rest.
For various reasons that we will see, Chinese don’t use Facebook, or Twitter, or Youtube, or MySpace, or eBay. They don’t read Boing Boing or the Huffington post, and they chat in their own QQ chatrooms. They rarely receive the viral emails that we receive, and instead they get others like this one. They have all the things that we have and some more, but they built them in parallel in their separate parcel of the internet.
Whereas the sizes of the bubbles above are based on quantitative data collected by a respected source, the positions are only decided by semi-informed feeling. Any reader could argue that China should not be so far right. There is Hong Kong, Chinese-Americans, even mainland Chinese who do surf in English. And I will be forced to admit that the Venn Map is flawed, because it fails to show this.
But in such a fast changing World like the Internet, position really means nothing. What holds today may be different tomorrow. What is really significant is the dynamics: which direction is China going, and how will the internet look in 10 years? Everybody agrees that China’s internet community is growing very fast, and that is natural. The worrying part is that it might also be moving away from the rest.
Third iteration: The Dynamic Map
Because in Western countries internet penetration is already very high and India is still lagging behind, in the next 10 years the Chinese internet will become almost as big as all the rest together. If it continues to diverge, it may grow into a parallel network, like a dark side of the moon, a vast, self-sufficient island that the government can cut out at any moment and most people inside it don’t even notice the difference. This defeats the whole idea of the www.
Whatever the real magnitude of the problem, it is clear to most observers that there is a disconnect between China and the rest of the Internet, and there are powerful forces pulling them further apart. Fortunately, there are also forces working to balance this, and the results in the coming years will very much depend on how those factors play against each other. Here is how my new map looks now:
The Forces of the Internet
As we saw before in this blog, some of the main factors that keep China separate from the World are the following, shown in red in the chart:
- Linguistic, as we saw in this post, where we proved that Chinese language is beautiful and unique in many ways, but it makes it very difficult for Chinese and foreigners to connect.
- Cultural, in the broad sense of the word, meaning that the communities have so different views and values that they cannot understand each other. This includes the problems with the Media.
- Political, the deliberate actions of the CCP in multiple forms, including Nannies, the Great Firewall of China (GFW) and directly arresting people, as we saw here.
And in green the main factors that go in the opposite direction. Here they are in detail, for the optimists to rejoice:
- The growing number of bridge bloggers and other internet uses that work to connect the two communities. These include not only the English language Chinablogs, but mainly Chinese people who translate foreign media and other content on the Chinese internet. From this humble blog I also did my bit against the GFW.
- The post 90s and 80s generations that already dominate the Chinese internet. Their personal tastes in arts, music or cinema will probably be more international, and push them to connect with the World. This point is object of debate though, and some Westerners are very skeptical of the post 80s.
- Business is one of most important factors that link China to the World. Since the construction of the EU, it is no secret that commerce can achieve the most ambitious goals in World Peace, so whatever your take is on those business minded Chinese, they are probably the main force that is still keeping the Chinese Island connected and holding the World Wide Web together.
What do you think? 你有什么想法？
Do you think I am exaggerating? Or is the problem even worse than this? Any factor I missed in the Internet Maps? Internet friends: you are the pixels inside the coloured bubbles, you know all about this World because it is your home: comment and help me improve my Map!
你觉得这很夸张吗？还是认为问题写得还不够严重？你知道我在互联网地图里忽略了哪些元素吗？网友们：你们是小圈里面的像素，那里就是你们家，帮助我改进我的地图！ U5KMU63NGPP2
Ian Gristede said:
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wpolscemamymocneseo said:
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It’s funny you mention the united role of bridge bloggers, particularly since this principle operates in both directions. One of the jewels of the Chinese internet was yeeyan, where users could translate English articles into Chinese.
I’m bringing up Yeeyan, of course, because it was shut down recently. The folks at Yeeyan provide the following explanatory statement:
由于我们对网站上的部分文章把关出现偏差，违反了国家相关管理规定；因此译言网需要暂时关闭服务器，并对相关内容进行调整。
When you get right down to it, of the three types of distancing that you mention, in the sphere of both linguistics and culture there are very powerful forces at work which are making these factors less and less relevant with time. We’re learning each others’ languages and there is a genuine interest by significant numbers on both sides of the Pacific to increase cultural exchanges. Even a politically oriented website like anti-CNN.com is still a cultural exchange because the mechanism of the site makes English language content accessible to Chinese readers. Of the three, only one of them, namely, the “political” one, involves an organization with agency (the CCP) deliberately and actively trying to cripple and cordon off cultural exchanges between the English and Chinese language internet communities.
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Hi, thanks for the info. It is a coincidence, i hadn’t read the Danwei article before I posted this, and I didn’t know Yeeyan was closed. That kind of sites play an important role to connect the internets. I hope it is just a temporary block, but who knows, you can’t count on the GFW to be reasonable.
More in general, I think efforts like Yeeyan should be replicated, or new ideas started from both sides. The majority of internet experts out there are gadget-obsessed business analysts, and I feel we are losing focus on what is really important.
The real deal is not about twitter, or facebook, or those things that Tech-crunchers rave about. Those things are only the tools, the real deal is the people all over the World that is connecting (or failing to connect) on the internet. Those interactions are going to change the World, its happening already, and 99% tech blogs find more interesting to speak of a farting iPod app!!
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I’ve enjoyed many of your posts and what you’re trying to do is some real high end conceptual stuff, so perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t completely agree with your post. First off, the part “Chinese don’t have Facebook, or Twitter, or Youtube, or MySpace, or eBay. They don’t read Boing Boing or the Huffington post, and they chat in their own QQ chatrooms.” Tons of Chinese use msn and skype instead of QQ and while they may not use those sites you talk about in large number, Americans and Japanese don’t typically connect on facebook or twitter either (and there was Ms. Murdoch’s myspace efforts).
I also see Kaiser’s ideas as completely different from yours. He’s talking about direct connections between the US and Chinese world on the web dividing people, whereas you’re saying due to language and the GFW (sorry for the oversimplification), there is very limited connection. While things lke the GFW definitely hamper the ability for Chinese to get in touch with those outside of China, there are still plenty of chances for connections to be made and many of these are helped by the massive overseas Chinese community which exists in virtually every country in the world.
[Reply to this comment]
Uln Reply:
December 5th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Point 1: MSN is very much used, I know, and Skype as well. But most of the times those are only means to speak with your friends or call your cousin who is a student in London. But they are rarely places to connect and exchange ideas with people you don’t know. QQ, facebook, youtube, etc. are places where cultures mix much. I see this a lot on Spain for example, where people are sharing videos and stuff from the US, which only 10 yars ago nobody knew about. Facebook is the same, now I have loads of foreign friends and I have to write in English for them, it didnt use to be like that. Of course, like you say, most Americans still dont have Japanese friends on facebook/twitter, etc. The bubbles are still not completely integrated, but important thing is the trend: the World is growing closer, China is not part of it (?)
Point 2: I agree, I never said my ideas were the same as Kaiser’s. But they are not incompatible either, they are just two sides of the same problem. He mostly speaks of misunderstanding, I speak of disconnect. It is partly BECAUSE there is a disconnect that misunderstanding happens. When people have netfriends, facebook friends, twitter followers etc. from different countries they tend to be more moderate towards that country, and try to see things from the other’s point of view.
For example, when an American/Chinese/etc politician says something stupid, I dont go and post radical articles saying how fkd up the country is, because I have many American/Chinese/etc. readers and I have to think twice if I am being fair before hitting the publish button. The people in anti-CNN mostly don’t have foreign friends and they take the side of conflict. Friendship (even if it is just the facebook kind of light friendship) leads to moderation and understanding.
Again, I am speaking of trends, it is about communities going towards integration, or communities diverging. The 2 last maps are the important ones, really.
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Interesting post. I think I am one of those overlaps on your map and my languages also correspond to my complex identities :/
I’m （multi-generation) Singaporean Chinese and like most Singaporeans, my primary working language is English although I speak Mandarin and Chinese dialects at home with my family. My Chinese(reading/writing especially) is not as good as my English due to the ineffectiveness of the local bilingual curriculum in my youth and the dominance of English in the local environment.
I surf the English internet primarily like most Singaporeans(people usually assume I am not Asian when they encounter me online). However, I also often look things up on the Chinese or Japanese internet(my third language).
I think the older generations in Singapore might be more comfortable in Chinese (my father’s browser’s homepage is some Chinese news portal) so I guess usage of the Chinese internet will vary according to proficiency.
I chat occasionally with mainland Chinese online and my impression is that the young ones are avidly studying English for business reasons with impressive zeal, believing that it would bring them a brighter future.I’m afraid I can’t really understand it since I grew up with English as a practical tool. Since I already know English, there isn’t really a language that I really desperately need to learn. Though I really should brush up on my Chinese (partially for 面子 reasons!).
I was chatting online with a mainland Chinese (in Chinese) and she commented that it felt strange that we were communicating in the same language although we belonged to different countries.I didn’t quite feel the same way because I normally type in English so there was a sense of distancing even though I speak Mandarin with my parents.
Most first generation and 1.5 generation overseas Chinese who were born and educated(even partly) in the PRC tend to be patriotic and keep tabs on what is going on back home in Chinese.Yes, they exchange Grandpa Wen photos.
By second generation in the West, language proficiency tends to drop.In Southeast Asia, Malaysian Chinese who have received quite of lot of their education in Chinese schools can be quite good at Chinese.They also understand Malay and English because they need to.
Re Indians: As everyone knows, quite a lot of them understand English even if their command of the language is imperfect.I think the mainland Chinese might catch up eventually though.Despite the huge amounts spent on English, most Japanese are not proficient in English and most of them don’t need it anyway. I got by in Japanese in Japan.
P.S. I am thinking of learning a fourth language. It will be one of the ones on your map. Some people have suggested Korean since I understand Chinese and Japanese. Suggestions anyone？
P.S.S. I am thinking of starting a blog on East Asian culture because of my interest in this part of the world even though I don’t even live there. I wonder if it would be preposterous of me?
[Reply to this comment]
Uln Reply:
December 5th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Re language: my own advice is stick to Chinese or English, they are both massive languages, the largest in the World in terms of raw vocabulary, and as you see in the map they are by far the most used on the internet. Even if you are native in those languages you can still continue to improve your written language, most native English speakers don’t know even half of the vocabulary available!
Moreover, all the cluster of the Western bubbles is slowly merging into English (content is very similar or translated from/to English) as the main internet written language, so possibly in the future there will be just 2 large independent poles: English and Mandarin. Those 2 languages will be the key to understanding the internet.
I was studying German for 3 years before I started mandarin and I even spent some months in Germany. But then I got into Chinese, and I realized it is a lifetime of study. I have since decided to quit learning more languages and to reach the highest level I can in both English and Chinese.
This blog is part of my effort to get there in English, I think I write more fluently now (and I hope with less faux amis) than when I started the blog a year ago.
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Welcome to the Chinternet, that´s what the Chinese internet has been called since 2006. It´s special and it has a special name. We do have myspace in China.
What really needs to be done is to look at the ratio of inter-regional data transfer to that of data flow inside a region. For example, data flow out of China to data flow inside China. This would give a truer indicator of ¨insularity¨ over a common time interval than the methods described above. If the data are available.
But, you need to allow for the effect of scale - because China´s internet would be more insular than say that of Belgium, because China is so big that almost everything Chinese people can think of is available domestically, so they have less need to make international/regional connections. I mean, even without language or other barriers there would be some clustering of connections to within China or the USA.
Someone must have written a PhD thesis on all this
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Uln Reply:
December 5th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
You are completely right, this subject is important and someone should be doing proper research on it. The only thing I am doing here is setting a framework and asking questions. I dont have the answers because I dont have the time to do any serious research myself, my basis is just my own experience of the Chinese internet and my close friends in Shanghai.
On the other hand, I am not sure these things are so measurable, at least not in the way to put it. There is probably a way to estimate how much data goes in and out of the Chinese internet, but how do you separate the noise from the real content? How do you know how much of it is anti-CNN people streaming CNN to write agaist it, or simply Chinese living in the States who participate in their home BBS? Those things definitely wouldnt count as “connection”…I would rather imagine some kind of research based on users surveys (which exist already, but almost always focused on marketing, not on political cultural issues).
Re Myspace: oops, thanks for the correction, I will edit. However, I dont think it is so big here as in US (at least I never seen any of my friends/coworkers using it).
UPDATE: Just checked quickly on google and it looks like Myspace in China has a lot of trouble to grow and is even planning to restructure the business. Part of the reason seems to be censorship. See this link
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Pretty accurate map, although I’d say that Japanese and Korean networks are not that linked to the english one. Of course its not politically separate as the chinese is, but most japanese/korean people can’t speak english and aren’t interested in US content at all. I have more chinese friends in facebook than japanese, firewall and all.
I wonder about Arabic content as well.
Orchid: bah, Korean’s not worth it. And while Hangul is easy to learn its a pain in the ass to read a whole page of it: a non-spaced uniform phonetic script? Full of homophones? Not as smart as they think.
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True that when I was in Japan, one of the things that surprised me most is the low level of English, even in Tokyo. It is really not so different from China in that way. But on the other hand there seems to be more cultural contact between Japanese and Westerners, Japanese pop culture is attractive in the West, and also they dont have the problem of GFW or the political issues with DL, etc…
A weak point of my map is that I have no real data to position the 4 balls: Russian, Arabic, Japan and Korean. My map is a guesstimate in this respect. However for each of them I have strong reasons to think that there is less of a disconnect than with China, because the cultural, political and language gap is smaller, and they have no GFW… and also because Chinese bubble is much larger and faster growing than the 4 of them added together..
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Good stuff. I think ou will refine it even further. Keep it up. I am quite sure that in time to come your mapping will be one of the reference point for politicians as the world get smaller, and power even more concentrated in a few hands. Search engines will use your mapping to devise various advertising schemes to generate more revenue. I can see the potential for such mapping.
Only one point of disagreement. in time to come, the china bubble will link and integrate with the English bubble. More Chinese are learning and using English, and other English speaking nationalities are learning Chinese. This may not happen overnight, maybe by the next generation, but it is growing fast.
I chance upon CCTV 9 English National English Speaking contest. I was so impressed that I watch and followed the entire series. China will be more integrated with the english speaking world faster than most think.
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I would point out how important travel still is as a way of creating understanding. As powerful a tool for the transfer of information as the internet is, it does not do this well.
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Hi Uln -
Always enjoy reading your blog, and now that you’ve written about something that’s quite close to the work I’m doing, I’d love to start corresponding with you directly and maybe buy you a beer next time you’re in Beijing or I’m in Shanghai. You have my email; please drop me a note when you get a chance. I’d like to send you the full text of a speech that I gave in the U.S. in October that fleshes out more fully some of the things that the CNReviews post you link to touches on. In the meantime, please keep up the great work!
Best,
Kaiser
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@Jeff - good comment, that is exactly the main point of this post and what I wanted to discuss here. Many Chinese are learning Engish, yes, and if you measure the traffic on the nodes between Mainland and the World, for sure they are red hot with data coming and going. But my concern is more qualitative than quantitative: there are contacts sure, but how much understanding is in them? are we building a sense of global internet community? Or do these contacts have the opposite effect of alienating the Chinese community from the rest?
@FOARP - yes, but the point of the internet is that the WHOLE world will soon have equal access to it,whereas intercontinental travel will remain for a long time the privilege of developed societies. Whatever the limitations of the net, it has much more potential to change the World than travelling.
@Kaiser - Sure. Thanks for that!
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FOARP Reply:
December 6th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Yup, that’s certainly true. What I would say, though, is that the interest even to bother to access foreign websites is not something which simply comes from nowhere. Had I never visited China, I certainly wouldn’t bother surfing Chinese websites, just as nowadays I have only marginal amounts of interest in visiting African, South American, or Indian websites. Travel creates this interest, it also gives a real-world gauge with which to measure what you read coming out of a country.
The average anti-CNNer has no interest in what happens in Spain, the UK, or the US, except in as much as how the media in those countries report stories about China. The average Chinese netizen also lacks interest in the affairs of those countries as they are unconnected to their own lives, and will only therefore become aware of them from the pieces linked to by their nationalist cousins. No growth in band-width or greater ease of access through language-training will decrease this misunderstanding now that affairs have fallen into their current feed-back loop. ‘Winning’ arguments on the internet does nothing to change this - and I say this as someone who has spent years now in argument, much of which now seems pointless.
The only thing which does to some extent provide people with realistic gauges against which to measure the rhetoric of the nationalists provided by the internet are movies, music which speak directly about circumstances in the wider world and whose appeal lies in their artistic virtue, and the internet does give greater access to this. I remember especially the shocked response of Chinese Radiohead fans when they discovered that Radiohead supported the free Tibet movement. This can do something to take the edge off demonisation.
[Reply to this comment]
FOARP Reply:
December 6th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
A while back Andrew Sullivan carried a quote on his blog that put this problem quite well. It compared the creation of garbage information (“Uruguay is preparing a nuclear strike on Israel”) and its countering (“Uruguay is small South American nation which is not and has never shown any sign of developing nuclear weapons or threatening Israel”) to encryption and decryption. Put simply, it is always easier to encrypt information than to decrypt it from scratch, since encryption requires only one level of complexity (e.g., “think of a ridiculous lie”) whilst to counter it you require two or more as must first engage with the garbage information before you can disprove it (e.g., “think of why this ridiculous lie is false”). In some circumstances people already possess the necessary information, but in an area in which they do not or in which the information they have supports the garbage information (i.e., is itself also garbage).
It is for this reason that, for example, most British people believe that the EU has sought to ban bendy bananas, because to disprove this you must first explain why this is impossible (i.e., that the EU does not have competence to make regulations in this particular area and at the time in question any nation could veto an attempt to create a directive). The information disproving the original lie is in most circumstances more difficult to understand than the original garbage information. The internet has so far propagated lies far more quickly than it has propagated the keys to countering such lies. Therefore, placed in the right places (e.g., people who don’t know where Uruguay is) and backed up with some fancy graphics, the lie I made at the start would reach many and be believed by some.
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Uln: I have known for some time about the massive amount of data in the Chinese internet but I don’t work in a tech startup. I’m more concerned about whether polishing up my Chinese will be useful in my offline life here in sg. Frankly speaking, learning a new language is more fun than practicing an old one. I certainly admit that my Chinese is not up to standard. (^_^;) I just wonder if it would be more efficient just to hire a Chinese national if really good Chinese language skills are needed. There is certainly no shortage of people who are expert at Chinese where I am. The question is whether it would become an essential skill for all. 小时候, 我的年代的中文老师都很凶，爱打人。如果我现在要改进我的中文，我看我必须去心理辅导先。哈哈哈（⌒▽⌒）
Oh, some young mainland Chinese learn Japanese or Korean. My impression is that they do it because of business or interest in the pop cultures.
I am too poor to travel at the moment so I am enjoying the internet resources. In the old days when people migrated, it was pretty hard to keep in touch with the “old country”. It’s different nowadays…
I am curious about how much contact Taiwanese have with their mainland counterparts. It seems that Taiwanese have their own bbs and blog networks. Of course, there’s the traditional v.s. simplified characters issue but it’s still the same language. QQ is pretty much a mainland Chinese thing.
Re: Japanese and Koreans. Japanese have their own social networks like mixi and Koreans have Cyworld. I’m not sure what is hot now because I’m not following Japanese trends avidly nowadays but Japanese have their own social etiquette for online networking. It seems to me that the Japanese and Koreans are pretty much self-sufficient (Koreans have their own portals/search engines) in that they can get everything they want in their own language. Koreans are very wired and Japanese surf the net using their mobiles.
However a lot of foreigners are interested in Japanese culture (less so for Korean) so they often learn Japanese and translate content for other English speakers. For Japan, this translated content tends to be in the areas of technology/design, traditional culture/cooking or pop culture/fashion. Chinese bridge bloggers tend to concentrate on heavy-hitting topics like politics and social issuesヽ（´ー｀）┌ Korean wave mostly affects Asians (in East Asia and Southeast Asia) and Asian diasporas. Mostly young ones who are crazy about Korean dramas and music and they learn Korean to enjoy the stuff.
Actually, I could write a whole thesis on why Westerners like Japan and dislike China and why they find Japanese culture more fascinating (>_ Right now, China doesn’t have a well-developed, attractively packaged pop culture ready to be exported to the masses yet that would draw attention.
Anyway, people dying for analysis of Super Girl and stuff like that can visit this blog.
http://cfensi.wordpress.com/
As a Singaporean, I can say that we are more tuned to Taiwanese pop than mainland stuff which receives little exposure here. I think my childhood was the Hong Kong entertainment golden age boom lol Anyway, I’m too old to be into all this stuff. （￣ー￣）
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Hi Uln
One thing for sure, is that the internet, left on its own, will always connect, never alienate. Unless there is intervention either by western or eastern politicians.
The vital point is that the Chinese and English blocks are fast emerging. Initially integration may be solely quantitative. That does not matter, thats always the first stage that any development must go through. Gradually and naturally the quality will develop, whilst the quantity will grow even more.
I would dare venture to say that you may find in the near future, the Japanese and Korean blocks integrating into the Chinese block.
Cheers
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I was inspired by your analysis of the worldwide internet condition. I’m a post 80s native Chinese who happen to be able to surf the net in both CH and EN. I think you might consider adding to your bridge part between the two communites those getting-over-the-wall programs on the net, made conveniently for a lot of people including me to use them literally to know the real stuff outside the wall. As long as the GFW policy continues, it is the English language instead of Chinese that should be adopted as language bridge to lead to mutual communication, the reason simply being English users are free to use it to express themselves while the Chinese users not.
Another thing, I don’t quite understand what you mean by saying “This point is object of debate though, and some Westerners are very skeptical of the post 80s”. First of all, the post 80s and 90s are hugely different in the values, thinking styles, and social positions they are holding, not to mention the difference between people born in 80-84 and those in 85-89, roughly. A lot of, if not most of, the post 80s are starting to work or already been working for several years, and they know with their personal experiences about the real society and the pains of living in it.
[Reply to this comment]
Uln Reply:
December 6th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Interesting, I am not so familiar with the differences between the different generations of post 80s/90s. It would be useful if you have some good link where we can read about that a bit more in detail, even if it is in Chinese.
As for the phrase “… some Westerners are very skeptical of the post 80s”, just follow the link in that phrase, it should lead you to a post about Han Han and a recent interview he had with Time magazine, where your generation is defined by some American scholars with a phrase that you might find interesting.. in particular they mentioned an “unspoken compact with the government” if I remember well. You might want to check that out.
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Very interesting analysis.
I was just walking outside on the street and saw my first ad (for a real estate development) on which the domain name was in chinese characters (since the new regulation was passed). I’m very much on the fence with this: I understand that not everyone should use alphabet, but it could regionalize some areas of the net even more.
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Uln Reply:
December 6th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
Ah, I still havent seen any site with character URL! wow, I am curious now, I am going to find one on google see how it looks in the navigation bar.
And good point about the regionalization as well. I am not sure chinese URLs are going to be so big, but it certainly doesnt go in the right direction.
Do you imagine if the URL for google.cn was 谷歌.中国？This would ensure that absolutely no foreigner ever goes into that site (because they dont even know how to type it!)
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[moderated off topic]
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Uln Reply:
December 6th, 2009 at 10:34 pm
John, this is completely off-topic. Sorry don’t want to put you off, but I remind everyone to please stick to the topic, I am trying to have a debate to learn about the Chinese internet and these comments are very distracting.
If anyone wants to speak of different things please just find a post that is related to that subject or else write it in my contact form on the sidebar and I will answer. Thanks!
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Uln, check it out, took a pic of it..
: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ybouc/4162740888/ (it’s still “.cn” though, the .中国 is coming next year, i heard?)
Now, having such domain names in themselves is fine. If Baidu wants to use both Baidu.CN and 百度.中国 , that’s not a problem. In fact, the former might be more convenient, just because it requires less keystrokes.
The problem is not so much on the domain names system itself, but how they will be advertised.
If everyone starts publishing only their domain in chinese characters, then that is really a step back on the “global” angle of the net. If you do both, that’s fine.
Again, I understand that you’d wanna localize the interface (and I guess that is why Japan and Korea use “search for [name of thing] on [search engine]!” rather than put the URL in their ads. But they sometimes do both as well.
Anyways, it COULD be a slippery slope, and I hope it isn’t, because this affects China, of course, but it could also affect arab countries, Israel, Japan, Korea, and many more.
Let’s see how it plays out, I guess…
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Uln Reply:
December 6th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
I see. On second thought I am not sure this will be so important. Because I assume sites that advertise in character URLs are all written in Chinese anyway, so for a non Chinese speaker it wouldnt make any difference if the URL was pinyin, it would just make him waste one click. I dont think any company will be so dumb as to pay the whole translation of their site to English and then advertise only in characters..
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Uln: yeah, that’s true indeed. it might cause some issues when your chinese skills are just on the fence, though..
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Uln,
Interesting stuff. While I agree the GFW is contributing to and perhaps reinforcing the so-called “disconnect” between the Chinese and English bubble, I don’t buy your speculation that the degree of disconnect between the English bubble and the Arabic, Russian, Korean and Japanese bubble(essentially all non-western language bubbles) is less than it is with the Chinese bubble. You said you have “strong reasons to think” so without providing specifics. You believe that their “cultural, political and language gap is smaller”, I wonder how. Politically the users of Russian and Arabic internet are equally detached from their western counterparts as the Chinese are, if not more. Culturally the Koreans and Japanese are equally detached from the west as the Chinese.
In my opinion it is a no-brainer that language and culture play much more vital roles in creating and reinforcing the disconnect between any two bubbles than anything else, including the GFW. The fact that we speak different languages and have different cultural roots and perspectives determines that there will always be some degrees of disconnect. It is nothing to be afraid of. Don’t get me wrong, I do think people should communicate and exchange ideas with other people (especially people of other countries, cultures and backgrounds), I just don’t think that we need to eradicate the disconnect and be all the same. That would be extremely boring and dangerous. In the case of China vs. the west or any country A vs. country B for that matter, the disconnect exists because (1) most people have too many mundane things to worry about and they are simply not interested in what’s going on in the other country/part of the world; (2) language barrier (enough said); (3) even without language barrier cultural differences set people apart. There will always be a disconnect between an English-speaking American and an English-speaking Chinese. Likewise there will always be a disconnect between an English speaking Chinese and an English-speaking Korean. People see things differently, it is this simple.
Of course the Chinese don’t read Boing Boing or the Huffington Post, just like most westerners don’t read Sohu or Tianya. I don’t see there is anything wrong with that, it is what makes this whole internet thing amazing. If we were all to read more or less the same stuff, it would be so dreadful.
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Uln,
One more thing: Perhaps it is just me (excuse me if the following makes no sense to you at all), but is there a tiny dose of cultural chauvinism in this whole thing? Somehow I (again, perhaps it is just me) sensed that the disconnect becomes worrisome because western governments/strategists/analysts/scholars/intellectuals/commentators fear that the Chinese will be further drifting away from the current western-centric world order and creating their own world? That this disconnect is only going to cripple and paralyze the west’s ability to influence China?
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wangba Reply:
December 7th, 2009 at 11:57 am
Ah, but that’s only assuming that a “connection” implies some degree of influence. But if you look at the “connected” countries pictured above, I do not believe that Korean, Japanese, or Arabic internet is really influenced by English internet at all.
I think the picture is a bit misleading. The countries grouped together gives sort of a wrong impression. It would probably work better as a web-like diagram, where it would show how well connected each country’s internet is to each other. I would imagine that more visitors from around the world visit the English speaking internet than the Chinese one, perhaps that’s the point being presented here.
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Juchechosunmanse Reply:
December 7th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Sure, only because English is the international lingua franca, not Chinese.
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arek oner Reply:
January 10th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Don’t forget that it connection implies a possibility for mutual influence and understanding. It’s a two way street. Just as weel as either the US or China could use it to extand their soft power.
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Orchid,
Your observations on why the majority of westerners (we are not talking about those scholarly people like Uln here,
) prefer Japanese culture over the Chinese are spot on. In short, China’s current image as a totalitarian, backward, third-world, not-so-creative and quite clumsy country simply doesn’t look appealing to most people. Plus there is the fear factor: that China might one day become an equal vis-a-vis the west, an entity that is perceived as powerful enough to challenge the west. This thought of course doesn’t bode well for most westerners. For the same reason they will always be wary of Russia, unless Russia becomes part of the west (which is possible). It is always more comforting and safer to be drawn by the very exotic Guyana. 
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arek oner Reply:
January 10th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
I wouldn’t say thats exactly how the west perceives China. Even some liberal journalists have been making statement in the press that they recognize China’s political and economical effeciency lately. Also China is already an equal vis-a-vis the west. The American military strategy is based on high technology which relies heavily on information. By destroying one of their own satelite in 2007 China as proven that it is able to shut down the whole communication system for the information so crucial to the United States millitary. Should we also mention the US$ 1000 billion worth of US bonds the middle knigdom aquired recently? Now, let’s look at the progress of China’s economy over the last 40 years. Hunger was endemic in the 60′s and now China can afford to “buy” america! Only a superior political, strategical and economical culture could acheive such results so fast. If its better, faster and stronger, of course the west will want to learn about it and the fear might just fuel that demand for knowledge, if fear there is. Just think about the buzz on Japanese management methods back in the 70′ and 80′, America was terrorise at the rise of Japan in the economic war they were wagging but they sure wanted to learn what made them so great. Universities and libraries were filled with books on the subject. Japan has just lost two decades, China will surely steel the show. No need for inferiority complex on any side of the bargain.
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Wukailong Reply:
January 11th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
Interesting. I never thought about shooting down satellites, although I remember that particular piece of news. Looks like the US has an Achilles’ heel right there.
On the other hand, inferring from China’s success that it has a “a superior political, strategical and economical culture” really seems like a stretch to me. Good management and successful reforms? Definitely. But for me it looks like people get over-enthusiastic just because of China’s sheer size. It’s not unlike the previous “tiger economies” technically or economically, it’s just much bigger.
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Can you surf into my website?
I found your blog originally via ESWN and I find the posts interesting as well more than a few of the comments. I am returning to live and do business in Dalian with my Chinese wife this time! I look forward to reading your posts often!
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Before I say anything I want to clear things up by saying that whatever I type below has NOTHING to do with politics.
I just want to add Taiwan to the map because of its influences in Mandarin Chinese movies, music and the still young democracy. Taiwan is not often mentioned in international media due to its small size and population. But it is a place where the Chinese speaking people can speak freely to the world.
Now on to the map. Strictly speaking, Taiwan is officially called republic of china, but it is not considered a country by most nations. That is clear. But it does have its own flag. So I think you can put Taiwan near Japan and Korea (a smaller circle though)and connected to China. And since it uses mainly Chinese, it will overlaps with China more than the others in the future.
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Kevin B Reply:
December 14th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Willie,
The English language flag uses the current UK flag, though England is only one (though by far the major) part of the UK on the one hand and the USA is the country with the largest number of native-English speakers.
I think Uln just had to decide on the flag of the sovereign nation now ruling the area whence came the language. So no English flag, since it’s not sovereign (since 1707), and no American flag, since it’s a daughter country, not the source of English.
Similarly, the Yellow River valley is controlled by the People’s Republic of China. Also, the Republic of Korea has more people than the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, so its flag is shown. (Perhaps Korean culture came more from what’s now controlled by the North, but who really knows?) Cf. Spanish flag instead of Mexican, Portuguese flag instead of Brazilian, Saudi flag instead of Egyptian, German flag instead of, well, never mind.
So, though the ROC (Taiwan) may need to be noted in the text, it’s not home to one of the top-10 languages on the net.
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I’ve really enjoyed the articles you do on how China, both linguistically and by internet, is becoming (or continuing to be) its own self-contained society.
With Facebook, twitter, youtube and so many other things blocked in China for the foreseeable future, I’ve been thinking of switching over to local equivalents (language not a problem - I’m an expat that has spent almost 2 decades in greater China), but have been having trouble figuring out which is which, or in the case of youku, how to find things on it. Could you possibly provide some pointers? I don’t want to be left out of the Web 2.0 anymore.
Thanks
Mike
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My two cents on the “main factors that separate China from the world”:
Linguistic is probably the biggest reason that separates China from the rest of the world in both ways. Actually this applies to any two countries that speak different languages. However, IMO Chinese is more exposed to western cultures than people in western countries to Chinese culture. I’m not saying there’s no misunderstanding or prejudice of western countries in Chinese minds (in fact quite a lot) but giving the strong influence of western culture in China and the increasing number of Chinese who are studying English (mandatory in many elementary schools), I have to say Chinese on average knows their counterparts better than the reverse. This is especially true in the case of expats where most Chinese overseas citizens are students or business people who master the native language in a level of basic conversation while a lot English teachers and businessmen in China can barely speak Chinese. That’s probably why you hardly hear Chinese expats grumbling on the host countries’ domestic affairs (except for their media’s view on China) while a lot expats in China made many complaints. On the Internet censorship, I believe censoring English websites did much less than blocking Chinese expats’ websites in Chinese. How many Chinese read English articles on Chinese issues or international news? Instead most knowledge of foreign countries comes from Chinese news (official and expats’ blogs/forums). Ironically, Chinese overseas as a group are, generally speaking, pro-government and have less “foregien-moon-is-rounder” illusion than people in China.
Anyway, things are improving. China has just opened its door to the world for 30 years and so much communication has already been done than probably the last 5000 years combined. I see more challenge than rivalry. There’s a contest between China and the west, in a who-is-the-winner-to-know-other-better competition. The winner will learn lessons faster and have an upper hand in future.
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Uln, I’m starting some research on asia’s virtual worlds, rather similar to how you’ve started the discussion above. I’d like to piece together a picture of the parallel Chinese, Korean and Japanese worlds, and their companies/govt etc and if and when they will pinch off from the English internet. I was thinking that since China is already the largest English speaking nation in the world, when China reintegrates with the English Internet, it is not so much the govt talking but many angry Chinese who are fedup with being misrepresented in the western media. Is it ok I use your material with full attribution for my research? Thanks! CP
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Uln Reply:
January 14th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
@CP: Sure, no need to ask, I think the Creative Commons licence lets you do just that. Don’t take the above pictures too literally regarding Japanese and Koreans though, my knowledge of those too countries is superficial, and this post was meant to make some points about China rather than about those.
I would be curious to see your results regarding those other Asian countries and whether they are as far from the English internet as China. If you publish it somewhere give us a link.
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To start having money with your blog, initially use Google Adsense but gradually as your traffic increases, continue adding more and more money making programs to your site.
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Hello. Solid job. I did not have this on a Wednesday. This is a fantastic story. Thanks!
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