Imagine a world without Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It may be unthinkable to many yet roughly 642 million Internet users in China (based on 2014 statistics by We Are Social) have zero access to the world’s most popular social media platforms. These web users make up 47 percent or nearly half of the country’s entire population. With more than a dozen government agencies watching over the Internet restrictions, dubbed popularly as the Great Firewall of China, it’s no surprise that Chinese Internet companies dominate the country’s existing social media landscape.

Climbing Over the Great Firewall

The Great Firewall of China, also known as the Golden Shield Project, is estimated to employ nearly 100,000 people to monitor Internet activity. Apart from blocking access to certain websites, bandwidth throttling and keyword filtering are also implemented. Private companies are also mandated by the government to be primarily responsible of their online content.

To truly figure out what is specifically censored by the Chinese government, a team of researchers at the Harvard University - Institute for Quantitative Social Science conducted the first large-scale study of the Great Firewall by creating accounts themselves in the country’s existing social media accounts. They wrote statuses and blogs, posted photos, and consequently observed which ones were taken down or left alone by the Golden Shield Project army.

Here’s an excerpt of a Science Magazine report about the study:

Posts created by the team advocating collective action were between 20% and 40% more likely to be censored than were posts not advocating it. Posts critical of the government, on the other hand, were not significantly more likely to be censored than supportive posts—even when they called out leaders by name. “Criticisms of the state are quite useful for the government in identifying public sentiment, whereas the spread of collective action is potentially very damaging,” Roberts (one of the researchers) explains.

For the past couple of years, it has become exceedingly difficult for non-Chinese social media outlets and technological firms to climb their way up the Great Firewall. Google for one finally gave up its protracted negotiations with Chinese authorities over the banning of certain search keywords and terms in 2013 by turning off a notification that alerted users in the country of a potential censorship. Late last year, the Chinese were prohibited from using Gmail.

The Evolving Dynamics of China’s Social Media Landscape

The current state of social media in the Land of the Sleeping Giant is not only unique because of the government censorship but it also has to do with its rapidly evolving social media affairs. A recent article published in Tech in Asia magazine referred to the country’s social media market as “confusing” because of its rather fast and unpredictable changes. A similar post at the Advertising Age website described China’s social media as the “most unique, fragmented and dynamic in the world”. RenRen (Facebook’s counterpart in China) used to dominate the country but was later on replaced by Weibo as the former’s number of users reduced drastically. Weibo, however, is now dethroned by Wēixìn, popularly known as WeChat.

Yuanbo Liu, an account executive of the content marketing platform Percolate, talked about how social media in China takes on the swiss-army knife approach. By and large, the platforms used in China do not have the singularity of popular social media channels such as taking a photograph and sharing it on Instagram. The swiss-army knife approach makes it possible for Chinese users to use one social media platform for a variety of services. Take WeChat for example. This messaging service also functions as social sharing channel and business location finder at the same time. You can even order a cab through WeChat!

Which social media channels are dominating China now?

WeChat

Tencent’s WeChat (Weixin) is undoubtedly dominating the country’s social media industry. Launched in 2011, the app does almost everything - from its Moments feature (similar to Facebook’s News Feed) to making restaurant reservations to its Paypal-like wallet system. In 2014, WeChat has the world’s fastest growing social media community, with roughly 600 million users and a whopping 40 percent growth last year.

Unlike Facebook, the lack of advertising in WeChat makes its users feel more comfortable using the platform, providing the social media channel a lot of room to grow. Businesses, however, can create public accounts and engage with their existing and potential customers. Celebrities and key opinion leaders can also do the same thing.

Furthermore, WeChat continues to improve in terms of functionality on a somewhat monthly basis including a booty call-like feature (just shake your phone to figure out who’s nearby for a cup of coffee) to giving developers freedom in personalizing the app for business accounts.

Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo

Both are microblogging platforms that work similarly to Twitter; it allows the user to have 140 Chinese characters for posting, commenting, and reposting. It also utilizes the @ symbol as well as hashtags (you can even own a hashtag on Weibo!).

Sina Weibo is a product of the Sina company while Tencent Weibo was brought to life by Tencent, the same company behind WeChat. Sina’s Weibo used to dominate the microblogging platform in the country but the soaring popularity of Tencent’s WeChat has made it possible for the company’s version of Weibo to gain more followers.

Youku Tudou

Youku Tudou, the country’s largest video streaming site and functioning similarly to YouTube, used to be separately known as as Youku and Tudou. It was not until in 2012 that both platforms merged. In this press release, the two companies announced that “they have signed a definitive agreement for Tudou to combine with Youku in a 100% stock-for-stock transaction.”

Currently, the video streaming site boasts of 500 million users and daily video views of more than 800 million. In December of last year, Leo Yao, Youku Tudou CTO announced that the company will be expanding to hardware (its first three devices—a WiFi router, smart TV box, and 15.6-inch Android tablet) and launch a cloud entertainment business as well in 2015.

Douban

Douban, with over 75 million registered users as of late last year, is a platform utilizing interest segmentation strategy. Both registered and non-registered users can discuss their interests and hobbies in Douban. Many have considered this platform similar to Reddit.

What’s in store for China’s social media future?

Social media users in China are expected to reach 504 million by 2018. Furthermore, eMarketer estimated that mobile social networking users will reach 335.9 million by 2015. These figures make it perfectly clear that social media in China will be more than just what it was originally designed for (be constantly in touch with friends and family) but also a convenient venue to meet all of your online and offline needs.

What do you think about China’s Great Firewall? Would you like to have a new social media channel similar to WeChat? Share you thoughts and insights below!

About the Author

 

About Kyjean Tomboc

Kyjean likes to think of herself as an online content machine but her love for all things feline makes her human after all! She writes mainly about health, science, social media, and online content marketing. If she’s not writing, she’s either scaling mountains or taming tardigrades. Follow her tardigrade taming attempts at Twitter - @autodidactikai