Life behind the Great (Fire)wall of China: Problems or potentials?
Between the year 770 B.C and 1633 A.D, dynasties in China built the Great Wall to protect their best interest – control, disguised as concern over the life of their subjects. Fast-forward to 1996 and present-day China, there is no longer an imminent threat to the citizens’ life, but the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government created yet another form of barricade, the Great Firewall, clearly illustrating their effort to protect their best and only interest all along – control.
So, when you think about it, nothing much have changed for China in the last few centuries. People in positions of power are still evidently obsessed with the idea of total control and dominance through censorship and restrictions of website to keep out pernicious political ideas easily carried through US-based internet platforms.
Thus, majority of populations outside of China assumes that China’s internet (Chinanet), in the words of Michael Anti, “is like a dead-land, wasteland”. It is a generally-held idea by many that Chinanet is an extremely stripped-down version of the world wide web everyone else is enjoying which heavily stifles local creativity, innovation, expression and human rights progress.
However! This post is here to show the other side of the story, to provide another perspective on life behind the Great Firewall of China and how instead of being entirely problematic, it can also be a diamond in the rough – holding great economic potentials for the PRC and businesses alike.
So, how does one tap into this supposed potential?
It’s literally as simple as going on Twitter to create an account.
Well, that’s it. There’s your answer. All companies have to do is to literally go on social media platforms and use it to their advantage in penetrating the ginormous China market. But there’s no Twitter, Facebook or YouTube in China, you say?
While that is true, Chinanet has an extended line of home-grown social media platforms that not only function similarly to US-based social media platforms, but is the key to reaching the presumed-unreachable China market.
Before venturing into the Chinese market via the social media route, companies must firstly understand local internet users’ relationship with social media; how often do they use it, what do they use it for and why do they use it for this purpose?
How often do Chinese consumers use social media?
Considering how quickly the relevance of social media sites is rising where they are progressively overtaking internet portals as an entry point to retrieve content (Chiu, Lin & Silverman 2012) and as the most popularly used platform for information dissemination, it is safe to say that Chinese consumers will be spending much more time on social media platforms than on other sites. This is further solidified by a McKinsey survey in China where it is discovered that Chinese netizens spend 46 minutes a day visiting social media sites compared to Japan’s 7 minutes and America’s 37 minutes.
What do they use social media for and why?
In terms of individual needs and wants, Chinese netizens are quite similar to people from other parts of the world. They use social media for the same reasons Americans use Twitter and Malaysians use Facebook – to connect and form relationships with other users online (Crampton 2011) to fulfill their belongingness and love needs under Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The only significant difference is that the Chinese are much more active in their engagement on social media than any other users from other countries whereby the factors behind their high engagement on social media are linked to the familial separation from rural-to-urban migration and loneliness caused by China’s one-child generation (Crampton 2011).
Most importantly, consumers predominantly use social media to gain pre-purchase information and it is stated that social media’s influence on consumer purchasing decision in China is unparalleled (Chiu, Lin & Silverman 2012). This is because China’s expanding social media universe are generally flooded with online product reviews and groups of vocal consumer advocates who are not hesitant in speaking out on substandard products or services. Thus, Chinese consumers are more likely to purchase a product if it was seen or mentioned on social media sites by friends or acquaintances because they value and prize peer-to-peer recommendations, user reviews or other forms of word-of-mouth much higher than information provided through news sources and advertising due to their distrust of formal institutions and government-controlled media (Crampton 2011).
Akin to the diversity in China’s 1.39 billion population demographics, not all Chinese social media users are alike. According to Chiu, Lin & Silverman (2012), Chinese netizens can be divided into multiple segments, each with differing usage reasons and patterns. Social enthusiasts aka brand’s best friend, spend most of their time maintaining friendship networks and often use social media to share product reviews and about their recent purchases. They are also the most receptive of advertising and brand-sponsored applications. Resenders are brand-friendly people who are mostly likely to purchase products seen on social media. They use social media to promote themselves by actively re-posting messages from other sources and although they do not create and post original content, they typically possess larger followings. Opinionated users, on the other hand, are consumers who find advertisements distasteful and are not hesitant in expression their opinions if they are unsatisfied with a product or brand. If not managed well, they have a high tendency to become a brand’s worst enemy. Other segments that are less influential towards a brand are readers, QQ spillovers and inactives.
Additionally, companies should also recognize the differences between China’s home-grown social media platforms and those that are US-based, and their underlying implications. To illustrate, China’s YouTube equivalent – Youku and Tudou, instead of being used to stream short videos of cute animals or humorous domestic mishaps like on YouTube, they are filled with longer and mostly professionally produced videos mostly made up of pirated and subtitled foreign programs such as Prison Break and The Big Bang Theory (Crampton 2011). An interesting point here is that despite having never been aired on Chinese television, these series somehow gained huge fan bases in China (Crampton 2011). Thus, Youku and Tudou appear to resemble online television services like Netflix or Hulu more so than YouTube which is something reflected in the usage pattern of young Chinese netizens who more often watch these two streaming sites instead of the traditional television broadcasts. This implies that a company’s advertisement release must take heed of its communicative channel to prevent missing large groups of a consumer segment.
Another significant difference which should be noted is the communication length on social media when expressed in Chinese versus English. In the Chinese language, each character is a word on its own while a single word can only be made up by multiple characters in English. Hence, on microblogs like Twitter and China’s Sina Weibo where only 140 characters are permitted per posting, companies are able to advertise more easily and effectively on the platforms by using Chinese. As an example:
And so, the moral of the story is that within the problematic layers of the Great Firewall of China, lies potentials and opportunities for businesses to use to their advantage. Through understanding Chinese consumers and their social media usage landscape, companies can better penetrate the China market and manage their brand there via enhanced ways in engaging with the different types of social media users, conducting consumer research, launching and advertising their product, and even combating crises. Furthermore, with Chinese netizens becoming increasingly active in engaging in discussions related to companies, understanding and getting on social media is as vital as ever for businesses because a lack of understanding and engagement within this domain no longer translates to a lost opportunity as it did formerly, but rather a risk that businesses currently cannot afford to take.
That will be all from me, thank you all for a semester of intense brain exercise.
References
Anti, M 2011, 'Behind the great firewall of China', TedTalks <http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_anti_behind_the_great_firewall_of_china.html>.
Chiu, C, Lin, D and Silverman, A 2012, 'China's social-media boom', McKinsey and Company.
Crampton, T 2011 'Social media in China: The same, but different' China Business Review, Vol 38, Issue 1, pp 28-31, <http://www.thomascrampton.com/china/social-media-china-business-review/>.
















