Social media in ChinaChina has about 670 million Internet users today with an Internet penetration rate of
48.8 percent. Interestingly enough, 88.9 percent of these users access the Internet via mobile
devices. From the most recent report of CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center
1/2016), one can see that the consumption behaviors and consumption needs of the netizens
are being highlighted, and companies are being encouraged to develop new social media appli-
cations for these presumed needs. The interactive part, including microblogging, which was so
intensely discussed only a few years ago, now draws much less attention (see, for example, the
earlier 2013 CNNIC report, stating “Users of microblog kept growing, and mobile users saw a
gradually dominating trend” (CNNIC 2/2013).
Another factor still very dominant in China is the digital divide between rural and urban
areas (e.g. China’s Internet penetration is up to 64.2 percent (Crampton 2011) in urban areas
and 30.1 percent in rural areas). There are also problems in gender structure, with 55 percent
being male users, and an age structure in which most users (78.4 percent) range in age from ten
to thirty-nine years (CNNIC 1/2016; see also Qiu 2009).
The most widely used applications in China are various forms of instant messaging, followed
by news, search engines, and blogs, in addition to the streaming and downloading of multimedia
content. The use of microblogging (see below) is at 30 percent overall and 27 percent for mobile
Internet (CNNIC, 1/2016). Globally well-known social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, and
Twitter, flourish in Chinese language media spaces such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, but have
been blocked in China since 2009, and this also applies to Wikipedia (replaced by Baidu Baike).
Nevertheless, from the data available at CNNIC, China’s own social media are prospering, and
in many respects the use of social media and the Internet in China resembles the pattern found
in the Western developed world and Japan and South Korea more than that in comparable
developing countries (Crampton 2011; Damm 2014). While many social media applications
in China have only become en vogue after their international counterparts were blocked, they
nevertheless possess their own characteristics, influenced by China’s social infrastructure, the
specific written form of the Chinese language and usage preferences, e.g. the high penetration
of mobile Internet usage. Interestingly enough, in Taiwan and in Hong Kong, no localization
of applications can be observed (for example, Facebook has its worldwide highest user rate in
Taiwan) (Wu and Wu 2013); what is even more astonishing is that in other East Asian countries,
e.g. South Korea and Japan where there are no strict regulations, international applications are
nevertheless seldom found (Qin 2011).
At this point, I would like to briefly introduce the various Chinese versions: for instant
messaging, Tencent’s QQ and WeChat are the most popular, while the previously popular MSN
messenger became defunct in China in 2014 (much later than in the rest of the world) and
was replaced by a Chinese version of Skype. The internationally well-known applications of
WhatsApp (Europe, North America), LINE (Japan, Taiwan), and KakaoTalk (South Korea,) are
also of little significance, again mainly due to the Great Firewall. Aside from the more rudi-
mentary QQ, WeChat as a mobile application has become the most popular form, and in many
cases the social and political discussions that were once found on Weibo have found their way
to what is assumed to be the more secure space on WeChat, although recent reports show that
WeChat accounts have been monitored and deleted. The entire official narrative on the usage of
social media, however, is shifting away from user to user and social interchanges towards com-
mercialization aspects, e.g. the marketing mode and the service mode (CNNIC 1/2016). There
is also a wide range of newer social media, such as Momo, Wangwang and Dingtalk and Wumii,
with a strong focus on market and commercialization aspects. Yu, Asur, and Huberman (2011)
concluded that the content shared on Weibo is more focused on jokes, images, and videos than
on current political and social issues; a large number of tweets are also just retweets.