What great firewall? Here’s what Chinese netizens searched for in 2018

The “great firewall” segregates China’s cyberspace from the rest of the world. Websites like Google and Twitch are blocked in the country, and content deemed inappropriate by authorities is heavily censored. But despite the information gap, it turns out that Chinese netizens are curious about many of the same topics and issues as their global counterparts.

This week, both Google and China’s top search engine Baidu revealed the past year’s top queries on their respective platforms. The lists provide a glimpse of what matters to people inside China versus those outside.

World Cup fans watch the Russia vs Saudi Arabia match at a bar in Beijing in June 2018. / Photo credit: Reuters

The World Cup truly brings the world together. The football tournament was trending across the globe. In China, one streaming platform recorded more than 4.3 billion individual views of Russia 2018 matches.

Why such enthusiasm from a country that didn’t have a team in the tournament? It might have stemmed partly from its people’s love for gambling. During the World Cup, half of the top 10 free apps on Apple’s App Store in China were lottery apps, leading to an apparent government crackdown.

China also shared its obsession on Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan Markle with the rest of the world. The royal wedding in May topped both Google and Baidu’s rankings.

But it wasn’t just the happy stuff. Disasters were also on people’s minds everywhere: Hurricane Florence, which raged through the US East Coast in September, was the second most searched news on Google. Baidu’s list was topped by Typhoon Mangkhut, the mega storm that battered China’s tech manufacturing hub in the same month.

Huawei finds a good ad spot – outside an Apple store in Shanghai in November 2018. / Photo credit: Bloomberg

The trade war between the US and China, as well as Apple’s iPhone launch in September, dominated Baidu searches, but they weren’t among the 10 most googled news events.

Even more interesting was another headline that made Baidu’s list, but not Google’s: Facebook’s security breach. The incident, which came to light in September, exposed data from some 50 million accounts.