CNReviews identifies four main differences between Western and Chinese social networking patterns:

1) Focus on entertainment — Chinese “netizens” use social networking sites primarily as a source of entertainment (illustrated for example by the Happy Farm phenomenon), while Western users tends to see social networking sites more as a tool for staying in touch with friends. My thoughts on this one: anecdotally, this holds true for me, but given how many games and applications there are on facebook nowadays, I’m not sure if this really is a big cultural difference. I personally suspect that in the West, there’s a generational divide — my age group, people who maybe had accounts on Facebook back in the day when there weren’t any games, see these sites more as a way of keeping in touch with (or stalking) friends, but my younger sister definitely makes use of all the apps and games that Facebook has to offer. If this hypothesis holds true, maybe China just doesn’t have the equivalent to my generation — there were games here from the start, so even people in their late 20s use these sites largely as a way to have fun online.

2) Higher tolerance for intrusiveness — according to CNReviews, extra applications, pop-ups and email reminders that Western users would see as annoyances or spam are instead popular among Chinese users, and help drive people more people onto these sites. I personally haven’t noticed much “spam” from these sites, but I definitely find Chinese social networking sites cluttered relative to my own preferences, something I’ve always attributed to different aesthetic preferences (see point 5 below).

3) Social networking sites as a public space — this is the difference that resonates the most with me, to me this seems like the biggest divide between Chinese and Western social networking. In the West we tend to see our list of friends on social networking sites as an online representation of our real-world network, whereas in China it seems much more common to create new networks online. In the US, it never would have occurred to me to add someone I had never met as a facebook friend, and I only very occasionally got requests from people I didn’t know, whereas here I get these friend requests all the time (and if I have no idea who the person is, I always turn down the request, maybe that’s a cultural faux-pas). When I had just opened my first “Happy Farm” and didn’t have anyone to steal vegetables from, another friend suggested that I add some online contacts — in his opinion, adding anyone from Wuda (a university with more than 50,000 students) was definitely fair game, but really anyone at all would do. I convinced my roommate to start a farm instead.

4) Building an online identity — the final difference that CNReviews highlights is that Chinese users see their profile as their face to the online world, and put a lot of effort into shaping their identity online — to the point of being willing to pay real money for clothes or jewelery for their networking avatar. Apparently Tencent, the company that owns QQ, makes lots of money from these micropayments. I’ve always been curious about who would be willing to pay real-world money for internet-world goods, like a dog to guard your Happy Farm, but apparently many people view their profiles as so important that they’re willing to make investments to make sure the person the profile presents to the online world is the person they want to be. It would be interesting to see more research on this phenomenon — I wonder how much of the difference comes from consumer preferences, and how much of it comes simply from differences in business models chosen by the big players in the social networking world in China vs the US (which in turn may have shaped consumer expectations of whether or not they should be driven to spend money on these sites).

In my forays into the Chinese online world, I’ve been struck by a few more differences between Chinese and Western social networking worlds:

5) Aesthetics — Chinese websites in general seem to love clutter — the more stuff on the page, the better — while Western websites seem to favor a more minimalist look that directs the eye to the most important parts of the page. This is true for websites in general, but it’s especially obvious for social networking sites. Just take a look at the difference between QQ for China and QQ for foreigners. For an example of what this looks like for a regular company, here’s the website of the place I work part-time.

6) Privacy — on Xiaonei, you can see who has visited your profile and when they were there. For me, this is a strong disincentive to browsing other people’s profiles, but my friends don’t seem to mind this feature. In fact, when I have browsed someone’s profile (for example if I follow a link from their minifeed), within a few hours I tend to get a friendly message saying hi and acknowledging that the person knows I’ve recently been on his/her profile page. It seems like people here see this feature as another way of connecting with friends. If it were introduced to facebook, I suspect people would start leaving in droves.

7) Being online at work — I don’t want to imagine the number of work-hours lost to Facebook in the US, but in China it seems not only more acceptable to spend your workday on sites like Xiaonei, the messenger service QQ also seems to have become an essential communication tool in many companies. One friend, who works 9 to 5 and seems to be online 24/7, told me that he uses QQ to communicate with his colleagues, and MSN to communicate with his boss (sometimes I meet people who have MSN accounts because they think that’s what foreigners have, and they want to try to make foreign contacts — maybe that’s the case with my friend’s boss). And this doesn’t just apply to white-collar jobs — when I go to buy my milk tea, the people who make the tea are always glued to the computer screen next to the jars of tea leaves, and when I bought my train ticket this morning, I heard the familiar “knock-knock” sound of someone logging into QQ coming from the computer that my tickets were being pulled up on. Not all of this time spent online is procrastination (or even just network-building). A lot of companies have incorporated the QQ messenger service (not social networking per se, but related) into their customer service. It’s often possible to make travel reservations, book dinner or ask questions about a product through QQ, and businesses often print their QQ number (QQ users generally have a number rather than a username) along with other contact information in advertisements or on business cards. Using QQ as a business tool is probably good for productivity, but spending time taking care of your Happy Farm is probably not — it’s hard to know what the net impact of incorporating online networking and messenger services has been on productivity.

CNReviews concludes their piece by asking what Western social networking sites looking to break into the Chinese market would have to change in order to appeal to Chinese users. Given that most of these sites (like Facebook and Twitter) are currently blocked in China, it seems like the first step isn’t to appeal to the Chinese user, but to appeal to the Chinese government — which might require making concessions that these sites aren’t (and shouldn’t be) willing to make.

If and when they do become accessible again, I think that to get a piece of the Chinese social networking market, the best route might be to stay foreign. I’ve met lots of people who opened Facebook profiles before the site was blocked as a way to practice their English, and maybe also because they liked the way the site is designed. Trying to become QQ and take over that market is probably a lost cause at this point, but there might still be a significant niche of users who like Facebook and other similar sites just the way they are — because of, and not in spite of, the differences.

One recent example is the online computer game World of Warcraft. Faithful readers of this blog might remember that the Jia Junpeng phenomenon arose the last time the game was down. That time, rumor had it that the government had forced the creators of the game to make it less morbid — put some meat on those skeletons, and make sure that dead bodies are buried immediately instead of lying around the game as rotting corpses.

Dagens Nyheter (and the New York Times) report that the game is down again. This time it seems like it isn’t a censorship issue per se. Instead, there’s a power struggle among different departments in the government over who should have the power to regulate the booming Chinese online world. Both the General Administration of Press and Publication and the Ministry of Culture claim to have jurisdiction over online gaming, and the Ministry of Culture has given NetEase, the operator of the game, the green light, while the General Administration of Press and Publication say they’ve rejected NetEase’s application. From the New York Times article:

Which agency will win the regulatory battle remains unclear, although the Ministry of Culture, with allies among other ministerial-level offices, is said to enjoy an edge. Regardless, there appears to be much for both offices to do. The government this summer proclaimed its desire to clean up the Internet, ridding it of pornography, gambling, violence and seditious material.

The ministry dived further into that Herculean task in the past week, announcing sanctions against 188 companies that it said were running unlicensed, vulgar or overly violent online games. NetEase and World of Warcraft were conspicuously absent from the list.

Anecdotally, cleaning up vulgar content on the internet doesn’t seem hugely controversial — when I ask my students about the issue, there are usually at least a few who think it’s a good idea both to clean up vulgar content and to put controls on online gaming in order to combat internet addiction (which is seen as a major problem, sometimes “cured” through internet addiction bootcamps, see here, here, and here).

But obviously other content is blocked as well, both politically controversial content, and then lots of pages that don’t seem to make much sense, like youtube, facebook, twitter, and pretty much every international blog-hosting site. Word on the street was that the government wanted a flawless National Day celebration for the country’s 60th birthday; social networking sites could possibly be used to coordinate protests or even demonstrations, and everything would be unblocked after the holiday passed in early October. A month later, nothing has happened. One source in this apartment speculates that blocking foreign social networking sites is a way to drive users into Chinese social networking sites (of which there are plenty, and they’re mostly all accessible), in order to keep the money in Chinese pockets (and maybe also the content on servers located in China that can be controlled as necessary). But it’s hard to know.

It’s also hard to say how effective internet censorship is. On one hand, until recently, a computer-savvy person could fairly easily use a proxy server to get around the Great Firewall. It seemed like if you were educated enough to figure out how to use a proxy server or read articles in English, maybe the government didn’t care what you were reading — it was the uneducated masses they were trying to protect. On the other hand, when the topic of the media or the internet comes up in my classes, there are usually only a handful of students who have even heard of proxy servers — and that’s with the selection bias of a group of highly-educated young people who have chosen to pay lots of money to study English. Something’s also happened with the Firewall in the past few months that makes it much harder to get around with proxy servers — maybe that loophole is being closed. Even I have by now more or less given up on blocked websites and switched from facebook to xiaonei, from youtube to tudou.

At the same time, Nicholas Kristof notes in his New York Times column that content can be posted online much more freely now than a few years ago, and that on his Chinese-language blog, he has been able to post entries on all sorts of controversial topics: “All my posts on the blogs went up instantaneously and have remained up for the last week; I find it impossible to be censored. The reason is simple: nobody reads my Chinese blogs. China has around 30 million active blogs, and as long as they don’t trigger political problems, the government doesn’t care.” He also says that in contrast to a few years ago, he can now post almost any comment on popular forums without being moderated. And when it comes to “vulgar” content, all you have to do is take a look at the latest content on chinaSMACK to see how broad the definition of “fit for general consumption” has become.

And then of course there are the millions of Chinese “netizens” who keep pushing the boundaries for what’s permissible (e.g. through stories about the mythical grass mud horse). People are incredibly creative when it comes to finding ways to slip through the censors, like replacing the word “harmonious” with the word “river crab”, which sounds similar in Chinese, but is less likely to flag the censors (for another example, see Tony’s blog post on the evolution of ways to write “local person” and “outsider”).

So in summary, it’s a complicated issue. During my year-and-a-bit here, the trend has been towards less and not more internet freedom, but the longer term trend still seems to have been a positive one, and I obviously hope that long-term trend will continue. At the very least, it would be great to have access to YouTube again, so that I can find out what this keyboard cat thing is all about… or maybe that’s precisely what I’m being protected from?