4 things you need to know about Chinese social media and censorship

The discussion on China’s social media has been going on for three to four years. Scholars and researchers write papers on it, marketing planners both within and outside China want to use this fast-growing tool to prop their business, even ordinary Internet users like my friends in Hong Kong, Canada, and the States are now on WeChat, the largest and fast-developing standalone messaging app by monthly active users.

But what exactly is (are) Chinese social media? What are some of the most popular social media platforms in China? Who are using them for what? Below are four points you need to know to help address these questions.

The sheer scale of Chinese Internet and social media use is just big, with increasing number of people going mobile

As one of Chairman Mao’s widely quoted sentence, “人多力量大” (many hands make light work). So is the case of social media in China. One of the key reasons why we are talking about China social media in Canada, U.S. and many other places outside China today is because of its sheer scale. By the end of 2014, China’s online population has reached 649 million, almost half of its popular is online. What’s new and noticeable is that, more than 500 million users are now going mobile. Such mobility and portability can lead to stronger social mobilization, decrease the digital gap between urban and rural China, and it is what make social media powerful today.

But what does such big number mean exactly? Well, if we compare it to Canada, Chinese online population is almost 20 times more than the entire Canada population.Research also suggested that the average Chinese netizens spend 25 hours on the Internet per week. the time slots where Chinese use social media the most if: after meal, before meal, before sleep, while commuting, or while at study or work. That is to say, on an individual level, the scale of Chinese social media users might be that every one in three urbanites’ daily life would be like this: they get up at 7.30 am, read a bunch of news notification from their mobile news apps or Weibo. Then, if they run into a heavily polluted day (as it frequently happens in major Chinese cities), they’ll probably go to social media such as WeChat, or Weibo while they are commuting and post pictures of the air pollution. If they happened to be browsing Weibo in early 2011, they would almost absolutely run into posts about the Saving Abducted Children by taking photo of them and post them on Weibo.

This incidence explains why social media, even thought heavily censored, are still relevant and important to China and the outside world. China’s policies are often seen as being made inside a black box without consulting ordinary citizens and that ardently citizens usually lack the resources or power to exercise their rights to supervise the policy-making and law-enforcing bodies. In the case of the saving abducted children campaign on Weibo, it not only caught traditional media’s attention, one of the initiators, Yu Jianrong from China Academic of Social Science, levelled up the campaign and wrote a proposal to the National People’s Congress, hoping to amend relevant polices.

Social media is disaggregate

Social media is not a homogeneous concept. Many of us have been talking about Weibo, WeChat, while in fact there are hundreds of social media service in China. Inspired by a Western social media-based marketing diagram, I made a simplified, Chinese version of social media landscape.

Because of the Great Fire Wall, China social media is very much of Chinese characteristics. Such phenomenon has been referred to by some researchers on Chinese Internet innovation as “C2C model” — Copy to China. You guys have Twitter, we have Weibo. While Facebook and LinkedIn are two of the most popular social media in Canada, they are either not accessible or do not have a large user base in China. Instead, we have QZone, Renren, Kaixin, which basically fulfills all the Facebook/LinkedIn functions you can think of. Then we have WeChat as instant messaging service substitute for Whatsapp and Snapchat, Youku, Tudou for Youtube, and we also have perhaps the fastest growing e-commerce sites.

However, for scholars and researchers who want to follow quality intellectual debates, these popular social media are NOT an ideal place to go to. Along with Dr. Timothy Cheek, professor at Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, I have complied a list of New Left, Liberal, Confucian-leaning platforms where Chinese intellectuals write and read on. As it turns out, almost all of them are traditional blogging platform or bulletin boards.

• Neither are Chinese social media users homogeneous.