Jens DammFor video downloading, YouTube has been replaced by Youku, Tudou, and other applications.
Possibly for copyright reasons, many clips on Youku and Tudou are much longer than those
found on Youtube. Moreover, since many U.S. films and TV series are not officially broadcast on
China’s TV networks, their popularity heavily depends on these video-sharing apps, which are
only shown and available within China.
The most widely discussed Chinese social media application, in terms of its assumed influ-
ence on China’s politics and society, is Sina Weibo, which offers features similar to those of
Twitter and, to some extent, Facebook (CNNIC 1/2016; Yu et al. 2011). “Weibo” is generally
used to refer to the most well-known Weibo of the company Sina, but it should be kept in mind
that other big Chinese portals, such as Tencent and Sohu, have also set up their own localized
versions of Twitter and Facebook, which were both banned in China in 2009 after the Urumqi
riots (Culpan 2009). Sina Weibo, used by 70 percent, is definitely the best known of all the
so-called microblogs—it is basically Twitter with quite a few improvements and the possibility
for creating larger groups and adding multimedia content. It is also the most discussed form
of social media with regard to the establishment of a society, criticism of the government, etc.
Recently, however, stricter censorship measures, the obligation to use real names (which is not
really always enforced), and general commercialization have led to a decline in this service, and
many discussions today actually take place within WeChat (more similar to the Japanese app
LINE or WhatsApp) than on Weibo. Although it cannot be denied that Sina Weibo has more
features than Twitter, it has nevertheless remained much more localized than Facebook and
Twitter. Sina Weibo has been reluctant to cater to other regions, and it is basically still main-
tained in Chinese and, for the most part, with simplified characters. A rudimentary English
version exists, rumours of a Japanese version have been heard, and a localized version in tradi-
tional characters has been set up for the Taiwan and Hong Kong markets (Hk.weibo.com and
Tw.weibo.com). Internet searches carried out with the Weibo-specific search engine provide the
same results, no matter whether simplified or traditional characters are used (Belkin and Cohen
2015; King, Pan, and Roberts 2013; MacKinnon 2012).
There is no actual equivalent of Facebook in China. Social activists working both in China
and in other Chinese language areas tend to copy their content from Facebook to Douban for
their counterparts in China. However, in China some functions are delivered by Weibo, and
in addition to Douban (which is very much focused on arts, literature, and culture, much less
on politics), there are other known applications such as Kaixin001 (more related to big urban
areas), QZone (more like Skype), as well as RenRen. Old-style bulletin board systems (BBS)
have survived in China, probably due to the fact that they offer more anonymity than the other
social media platforms.
The Internet in China, including the various forms of social media, is fairly well developed
from the point of view of technology, accessibility, tailor-made social media applications, and
bandwidth, but for years it has been severely restricted by a vast number of control mechanisms
set up by CCP and the state apparatus. Unlike other authoritarian regimes, however, China has
very actively promoted the use of various Internet applications from very early on and regards
social media as essential for modernizing the nation—that is to say, both CCP and the state
regard the “informatization” of society and the economy as crucial for economic, political, and
social development. As social media have provided users with ample opportunities to connect
with other netizens, to exchange ideas, and thus overcome the dichotomy between the state
and its subjects (the term “qunzhong,” or the “masses,” was used in China until the 1990s), the
emergence of social media has led to many discussions both within and outside China. Social
media benefit the emergence of a civil society by offering a specific public sphere (taking into
account that a public sphere in China is viewed differently from the way it is viewed in the West,