Let me start this post off with something nice: we’re very happy that major Western tech blogs are finally paying attention to what’s going on in China. That’s good. That said, please hire someone who knows what they’re doing because otherwise shit like this happens.
I should point out that article on Mashable is almost entirely based on the infographic by G+ (not to be confused with Google Plus), which is apparently “a community for professionals, academics & entrepreneurs.” So perhaps it’s not fair to blame Mashable for this. Anyway, let’s take a closer look at the post, shall we?
So how then, do the Chinese connect online [since Facebook, Twitter, etc. are blocked]? On their own series of social networks, mimicking several blocked foreign counterparts. Renren and Kaixin001 fill Facebook’s void. Sina Weibo is the microblog of choice in Twitter’s absence. Youku is a video hosting platform, which only loosely enforces copyright laws; think of it as a YouTube-meets-Hulu, because many popular TV shows and movies are posted freely. Jiepang is the most popular location-based mobile app, with Foursquare-style checkins.
I’m not going to attempt to claim that some of these services didn’t start out as copycats, because many of them did. That said, parts of this paragraph are wildly misleading. Let’s talk about Sina Weibo. Sina Weibo might be “the microblog of choice in Twitter’s absence”, but that phrasing implies that if Twitter was unblocked tomorrow, Sina Weibo would be in trouble. That’s just not the case, though. Why not? Because Weibo offers basic features that Twitter just doesn’t have, like commenting. And guess what? It has always had that feature. It’s not that they copied Twitter and then later down the line they refined the concept a little bit. No, they launched with a core feature that made the service fundamentally different — and yeah, I’m gonna say it — better than Twitter.
Since then, they’ve expanded in every direction, now offering things like IM chat and Weibo games, none of which Twitter has. Sure, they didn’t invent the concept of microblogging, but their service is not just a copy of Twitter’s, and suggesting that’s the case is just as misleading as it would be to suggest that Twitter’s service is just a copy of blogging services.
Now let’s move on to Youku, the “YouTube-meets-Hulu” that “only loosely enforces copyright laws”? Uh, what? Sure, that was true a couple years ago. Now, I don’t think there’s any more pirated content there than there is on Youtube (in fact, there might be less, given the number of clips from copyrighted shows that are on Youtube). And the Youtube-meets-Hulu description does a disservice to Youku, which was producing its own independent programming with great success well before either of those Western sites jumped into original productions.
Here's the infographic. Click to enlarge because it's freakin' huge.
Admittedly, there’s some pretty interesting stuff in the infographic, but there’s also some pretty dumb stuff. First off, when talking about the sites that China blocks, the makers of inforgraphic — out of all the sites that are blocked, of which there are many — decided to list the Huffington Post. Not only is the Huffington Post not blocked in China (works fine for me in Beijing, works great for my cohort Steven in Shanghai too), but also, who cares? Chinese net users do not give a crap about English-language news sites they can’t read (which is why most of those sites, like the Huffington Post, aren’t blocked).
Now yes, I’m sure HuffPo has been blocked at some point — many foreign news sites have been at one time or another — but it’s not blocked now, and it’s not a site Chinese net users care about, so why put it in the infographic? Here are some better ideas: Google Plus (where there actually is a pretty active and interesting Chinese community, by the way). DropBox. Blogspot. Many link-shorteners. Most public proxies. Boxun and a host of other Chinese-language news and BBS sites based overseas. The Pirate Bay. Wikileaks. I could keep going.
Then there’s the claim that “one million articles were censored each day” in China in 2010. That claim comes from this PDF, which cites its source as “official numbers.” Uh, OK. Guess someone wasn’t paying attention in high school when they learned about citations! I would guess that the official numbers they’re talking about include things like censored Weibo posts, and if that’s the case calling them “articles” seems a bit misleading. But of course, there’s no way to know, because they didn’t cite an actual source.
Now, I don’t meant to suggest that censorship in China is being overstated. Yeah, the internet here is censor-iffic, and it sucks. But I think it’s still important to be accurate about exactly what’s happening rather than just grabbing big numbers from vague sources. It’s also important to remember that a lot of censorship on the Chinese internet isn’t directly related to the government, at least not in the way people think. If you upload a video to Youku, for example, and it gets deleted, that generally doesn’t mean anyone in the government saw it, let alone said anything about it. It means someone on Youku’s content team felt it was too edgy. Obviously, that decision is motivated by what they know about government policy — and the government does sometimes issue blanket demands to delete certain types of content — but I think it’s still a useful distinction to make. So, does China censor a million articles per day? I highly doubt it. But are a millon things in China censored per day online, including videos, weibo posts, news articles, BBS posts, etc.? Probably. But let’s be clear about what’s actually happening when we talk about it.
This is not a copycat, it's the original, dammit!
Anyway, I’ve gone on long enough, but I can’t keep myself from making one last observation: in the infographic, it says sites like Kaixin001 have “Farmville-like games” such as Happy Farm for users to play, the implication being that it copied them from Facebook. Actually, it’s the other way around. Farmville is a clone of Happy Farm, which was developed in China and released nearly a year before Zynga launched Farmville.
Now that I’ve said that, I’ll admit that most of the infographic is OK. But come on, people, if you’re going to talk about copycats, please spend some time using these services first. Calling Sina Weibo a “copycat platform” is just dumb. Calling Youku a copycat platform might have made sense once, but it doesn’t anymore. Calling Happy Farm a copy of Farmville is straight-up ignorant, lazy, and wrong. And being lazy when writing about Chinese censorship does readers a disservice if you want them to actually understand the market.
Of course, we see this sort of thing all the time, and it’s kind of unfair to me to pick on G+ and Zoe Fox and Mashable. But come on, guys, let’s pick it up a little, you know? We’re not expecting you to learn Chinese or anything — although it’s easier than you think it is — but at least maybe consider the possibility that despite all the copycats, there might just be some interesting and unique stuff happening here.
Sure, there are a boatload of crappy copycats, too. But for the most part, they fail. The “copycats” that have lived this long have mostly done so because they’re not really copycats anymore, but services that offer robust and unique features targeted to the Chinese market (which, in many cases, is a market the Western innovators have utterly failed in because they assume they can just copy their own product to China and have it work).
In conclusion: Hmmph!
Link to full article
