A game of survival in China’s Web space

The first thing that comes to mind whenever one starts about China’s Web space is its “Great Firewall”. China has some of the world’s tightest restrictions on the Internet. Chinese news sites and social media platforms are quickly scrubbed of any content deemed sensitive or offensive. The number of blocked foreign services, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and the websites of the New York Times and Bloomberg News, has greatly expanded over the last decade.

Even beyond the censorship and the bans, the government pays as many as two million people, by some estimates, to flood social media with posts “devoted primarily to distraction through cheerleading for the state,” as scholars from Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California, San Diego, stated in a paper in May.

But this is an half-truth. Equally true if not more, is the meteoric rise in China’s mobile innovation. With home grown super successful apps like WeChat, Didi Chuxing (cab service), MeituPic (Picture editor), it’s hard not to overstate how quickly the mobile Internet has transformed the social rhythms of China’s urban life.

Figures say it all. Among the country’s roughly 690 million Internet users, 620 million now go online using a mobile device. Far more than the U.S., China is truly a “mobile first” market.

But these are not necessarily contradictions as many would like to see it as. It’s putting one’s best foot forward in the face of unfavorable circumstances. Being forbidden to develop tools for stimulating free expression or transparency essentially forces Chinese entrepreneurs to concentrate their resources on services that facilitate commerce, convenience, and entertainment. And the more successful those kinds of businesses become, the more money they and their investors have at stake, possibly cementing the status quo.

China’s new affinity for online shopping has powered the rise of Alibaba and other giant online retailers, including rival JD.com which have knitted together extensive delivery and courier services that can send anything to everything to just about every courtyard home in Beijing’s winding old alleys and each apartment in 30-story high-rises in second-, third-, and fourth-tier markets. In small cities that never had brick-and-mortar luxury shopping malls, the aspiring rich now sport Gucci labels.

Not just them, even small farmers in tiny villages are now peddling their organic radishes to urban foodies using the same platforms, sometimes charging a hefty premium for veggies grown without pesticides to newly health-conscious Chinese shoppers.

And all this is happening with Internet speeds far below those in other countries. The average in mainland China last fall was 3.7 megabits per second, according to Akamai Technologies. South Korea enjoyed the world’s fastest Internet, with average connection speeds of 20.5 megabits per second, while Japan was at 15 and the United States at 12.6. Just 1.6 percent of Chinese connections run faster than 10 megabits per second, according to Akamai.

But despite all the censorship and lethargy, Chinese Internet has also brought certain kinds of liberties, even if they are not the kind of broad political freedoms once envisioned. Many online communities have helped people from the disadvantaged groups or those facing discrimination to find each other. Blued, China’s most popular dating app for gay men, has become a critical hub, organizing sexual health forums and anonymous HIV-testing sites while gently pushing for public tolerance and acceptance. Hitomi Saito, a 17-year-old transgender high school junior in Beijing, runs a helpline on Thursdays over WeChat and other services, fielding questions from across China about transgender rights, health concerns, and strategies for dealing with families.

But still then, democracy remains elusive. Weibo, a once-freewheeling social platform sometimes called China’s Twitter, was briefly hailed for galvanizing a more open national conversation and serving as a virtual public square. But its heyday was about 2011; then enhanced censorship reined it in. Many of the “big Vs”—Weibo’s “verified users,” mostly celebrities and entrepreneurs who boasted millions of followers and broadcast news and opinions that sometimes questioned government actions—have since been pressured, arrested, or forced to give false “confessions” on state television. Others have voluntarily gone quiet.

Robin Li had summed it up well in 2010 speaking to Wall Street Journal about China’s censorship, “You know, we are a China-based company; obviously, we need to abide by the Chinese law.” Li, who’s the closest thing China has to a Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin figure, is not espousing a cyberspace gospel of creative rebellion and defiance. He’s stating what it takes to survive in authoritarian China, and survival is the first precondition for success.