If you find a Chinese blog, you may confused by so many unknown icons at the share buttons. You may want to know the daily life of Chinese and only to find the Chinese on the Facebook are also lived in you country. Here, I think you need to know something about the network in China.
- Great Firewall
He who does not reach the Great Wall is not a man. In fact, if you see this blog, the author himself has reach the Great Wall, also the Great Firewall. You’d better refer to the wikipedia pages for more details. So when you came to China, you may need to disappear from most of you familiar SNS websites. They have good severs but we have no connections for them.
- Substitution
Of causes, we need SNS! So smart person will make the firewall as a nature advantage to make a local substitution of some famous websites you know. In fact, if you talk to a young about twitter, he will think we have weibo and most of them even think twitter is a copy of weibo. We don’t care much about the copyright, so we like to copy and share without any limitations. I mean, if some websites can’t get accessed while the substitution can satisfy our need, we don’t care where it comes from. Also, I will tell you it is not easy to copy SNS due to different cultures and some codes may not copy the ideas but think from their own thinking. But I admit some ideas may just a copy but they must know the games of our Chinese minds. If you think we share universal value and I will tell you the universal value can’t make money for our IT companies and they need to make a living, also the universal value is so vague that anyone could use it as an excuse.
- Why and Why not
Why some SNS website is hard to get popular even they are not banned?
Why not some Chinese substitutions get popular in your country?
Everyone need a net but not everyone need a internet. If I want to find something interesting to share, I will share it with the one who may also think it is interesting. So you want free and no limitation and I think it is OK. But even if the GFW stopped, you may still find hard to make your products popular in China and even your products get popular, you will find it is totally a different thing comparing with your exception. I mean the internet is just a tools and it need a long time to get anyone OK to play this games with the same rules. When you know both rules, you will find the communication is really an important things and not anyone likes to communicate with strangers. They might do this once but not always. Just remember the Babel!
Anyway, I am against any limitation of internet and if you want to know the real life of the young in China, you may learn Chinese and read their life by some SNS websites. Never believe in the newspapers and I can read both and most of the time, they just want to tell you a story, not the real thing. Here I list some substitutions of your websites and I think with more communication, we could know each other better.
Facebook in China : renren.com
Twitter in China: weibo.com
Google in China: baidu.com
Gmail in China: mail.163.com
Quora in China: zhihu.com
Pinterest in China: huaban.com
Tumblr in China: lofter.com
Hacker News in China: news.dbanotes.net
amozon in China: z.cn or jd.com
ebay in China: taobao.com
If you want to know more, just comment.
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Ok, I think I need to give a way to help you visit Facebook or some other banned websites here in China. You need to search for goagent which is a software help you to build a free proxy for you only host on google’s severs. Here is the how to.