Clive Thompson of the New York Times has written a very interesting piece on Google in China. I thought the web was revolutionizing life here in the U.S., but its effects in China are and will be hard to imagine. The web is in some ways providing China the "Great Leap Forward", that Mao had intended. It is allowing China to finish transforming itself from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, information economy. One of the key factors driving this "Leap" is the desire to learn possessed by so many young Chinese. Last time I was in Beijing this notion was impressed upon me by the inventories of China's bookstores. In almost all cases, at least half of the shelves contained textbooks, on everything from English to advance computer science. Also, popular are books written by U.S. CEOs and management gurus. Not only are these self-education books found in China's bookstores, but also in common roadside markets. The will to learn is staggering.
But back to the Times article, I found the section on the cultural nuances as reflected on the web to be most interesting:
Yahoo executives quickly learned how difficult China was to penetrate — and how baffling the country's cultural barriers can be for Americans. Chinese businesspeople, for example, rarely rely on e-mail, because they find the idea of leaving messages to be socially awkward. They prefer live exchanges, which means they gravitate to mobile phones and short text messages instead. (They avoid voicemail for the same reason; during the weeks I traveled in China, whenever I called a Chinese executive whose phone was turned off, I would get a recording saying that the person was simply "unavailable," and the phone would not accept messages.) The most popular feature of the Internet for Chinese users — much more so than in the United States — is the online discussion board, where long, rollicking arguments and flame wars spill on for thousands of comments. Baidu, a Chinese search engine that was introduced in 2001 as an early competitor to Yahoo, capitalized on the national fervor for chat and invented a tool that allows people to create instant discussion groups based on popular search queries. When users now search on baidu.com for the name of the Chinese N.B.A. star Yao Ming, for example, they are shown not only links to news reports on his games; they are also able to join a chat room with thousands of others and argue about him. Baidu's chat rooms receive as many as five million posts a day.
As Yahoo found, these cultural nuances made the sites run by American companies feel simply foreign to Chinese users — and drove them instead to local portals designed by Chinese entrepreneurs. These sites, including Sina.com and Sohu.com, had less useful search engines, but they were full of links to chat rooms and government-approved Chinese-language news sites. Nationalist feelings might have played a role, too, in the success Chinese-run sites enjoyed at Yahoo's expense. "There's now a very strong sense of pride in supporting the local guy," I was told by Andrew Lih, a Chinese-American professor of media studies at the University of Hong Kong.
