This June 8 editorial by Chinese journalist Tang Yuankai in the Bangladesh The New Nation points out a few of the ways that Chinese internet companies are creating their own business models, and also how these new business models come into conflict with Wall Street analysts’ ideas about how to run a business.
Alibaba is devoted to reducing trading costs
between businessmen. Ebay focuses on "e-business auctions." 51job.com
is dedicated to offering a cyber platform for employers and employees.
Netease sells a lot of Chinese-style products and conducts its business
in a way that resonates with China’s market. It offers photo and ring
tone downloading and other value-added services for cellphone users.
Its profits mainly come from services of messages, cyber games and
other new fields, instead of advertising stressed by Wall Street.
Zhang Chaoyang, CEO and President of Sohu.com,
one of China’s chief web portals, pointed out that the people on Wall
Street are not users of the Chinese Internet, like Sohu.com, so it’s
impossible to see the true value of the best websites here and the
development trend. He said they only judge a Chinese cyber company by a
short-term performance in making profits, which caused Chinese listed
cyber companies to be underestimated for years.
Reporting from Zheng Zhou (a fast-growing second-tier city and the capital of the Henan province).
The entrance of one (seemingly disguised as semi-studious?):
The inside of another, filled with the usual crop of teenagers using IM, watching soaps, playing online games, and surfing the web:
And inside the same NetBar, posters of some of the games offered:
Lhamo Tsering is a young Tibetan woman who lives in a village with her family in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Dechen. In 2003 I did anthropological research for my master’s thesis and Lhamo and her family graciously offered me to live with them. I stayed with them for seven months.
Most village houses have electricity for lighting, but for cooking the villagers normally use open fire. Nobody has internet access or a computer in their house.
In the nearest town, Gyalthang town (Shangri La) [previously blogged], which is half an hour away on a bicycle, there are a few Internet cafés. Sometimes Lhamo would go with me to the Internet café and one day I had an email account set up for her.
The main road in Gyalthang town.
Since then, she has been emailing with those of her friends who also have email accounts and Lhamo and I have also kept in contact using email. The other day she told me that apart from emailing she has started using QQ.com to chat with her friends in Lhasa and other towns. "You can have Tibetan installed on your computer" she explains, but most of the people she knows use either Chinese or English both for emails and chats.
Our Taiwanese contributor Nydia Chen points out that the famous "Asian Backstreet Boys," aka the "Backdorm Boys" 后舍男生, have a lot going on these days. They’ve become celebrities in China with many videos beyond the original "As Long As I Love You."
They have their own blog, with all of their video works here (I can’t see them here on my Mac. I guess one really needs a PC to navigate Virtual China, when it comes down to it…or a new Mac that can run virtual Windows). You may be better off seeing their various clips on Youtube, including a live performance at the 21CN First Annual Net Popstar Competition in December 2005.
The Backdorm Boys graduated this week from the Guangzhou Arts Academy with degrees in sculpture. Check out their final projects:
If you read Chinese, the Baidu’s Backdorm Boys forum has pretty much everything you ever wanted to know, compiled by meticulous fans. For instance, the BB chronology shows that the "As Long as I Love You" video was released in March 2005; by August they were starring in the delightful Moto phone ad, "Radio in my head." Ogilvy & Mather says the ad has been downloaded 60 million times.
ESWN has translations and photos from BBS posts about student riots (and yes, they really were riots) at Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College of Zhengzhou University in Henan last week. As ESWN notes, this is another clear case of mainstream media getting their reports directly from BBS posts. It also highlights the anger that many college and university students are feeling today as their years of sacrifice don’t result in clear job opportunities.
Excerpts:
The national Department of Education issued a document several years ago to require tier-two schools to state their status on the diplomas. It is said that in the interest of fairness to students of all classes, the school hid the fact from the students so that the latter only found out when they received the diplomas. Of course, they are angry. Therefore, this riot occurred for cause.
But the infuriating part was that certain low-life students took advantage of the occasion to loot
stores. The electronic stores especially suffered great losses. The public facilities were also severely damaged.
And from another student post:
This group of several thousand people rushed onto the street. They walked down one street and smashed everything on the street: street lamps, telephone booths, bathhouses, banks, supermarkets … wherever they went, everything was picked clean. The supermarkets and electronic stores were
looted by some active students. Wow!…The front gate of the school was overturned. The statue of the founder was set on fire. Several cars in front of the entrance were overturned and vandalized.
Almost 10,000 people were shouting in front of the flag staff. It was loud and impressive.
We’ve got a wonderful new contributor at Virtual China — Kathrine Hoersted, Danish social anthropologist. Kathrine is going to be exploring non-Han (something like 90% of mainland China identifies as belonging to the Han group) Chinese virtual places and spaces. Think Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur, Naxi, and more. We’re trying to map out where non-Han online activity and expression shows up, and how much of it is created by non-Han Chinese themselves. Kathrine starts by trying to find Shangri La –Lyn
It used to be an imagined place, but now it has been rediscovered as a physical location on earth, and is even promoted in the virtual world.
To the Tibetans "Shamba La" is a mythical imagined place where people are said to live peacefully for all eternity. "Shangri La" entered the Western imagination via James Hilton’s bestselling 1933 novel Lost Horizon. In the fictional book he described a physical place in Tibet which he called Shangri La, where people of all religions and ethnicities coexist in happy harmony and live to be hundreds of years old.
In today’s cash-driven Chinese tourist market, competitive discussions have arisen between counties in Sichuan and Yunnan about where Shangri La was really situated. Many arguments and intents to prove the exact location have been based on descriptions from Hilton’s fictional novel. Recently, the local government in Zhongdian town was given official permission by the Chinese authorities to rename their town and County Shangri La. So the modern Shangri La now exists in The Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Dechen (Diqing in Chinese) located in the northern part of China’s Yunnan Province.
Zhongdian itself is the subject of many an English-language travel site and blog, 6,550 images via Google, over 1000 images at Flickr. Shangri La can be taken in on a number of Chinese-operated tours. Local Tibetans, however, continue to refer to this location as Gyalthang.
Check out the current issue of The Escapist, which explores Chinese gaming. Includes articles on Chinese piracy, transnational work relationships, and Chinese game design. Great stuff. I especially liked the article by Patrick Dugan on different approaches to cross-cultural textual communication in games. Excerpt:
A design I’m currently developing utilizes the Celtic alphabet, Ogham
,
as an interface in an Irish magic school, where different letter
combinations evoke spells and simple social cues. I’m divorcing the
alphabet from its original phonetic use and designing my own
alphabetical logic to be consistent with the game’s world and its magic
system. This means that a Chinese person could play it, needing only a
translation of the game’s embedded text to help him learn the interface.No matter what approach is taken to designing the
linguistic elements of a game, remember that human pattern recognition
is more powerful than any AI system yet made. An elegant interface, and
the play it supports, will reverberate as a universal language.
(via How the World Works)
Google has its "zeitgeist" feature which allows you to take the pulse of most popular search terms for the week, month, or even year; Baidu has a similar feature called "list of hottest Chinese searches" 中文搜索风云榜. Neither are particularly intuitive to me, frankly, since they both divide the search terms into strange categories–e.g., Google’s "spring break" list in April 2006. On the bad side Baidu doesn’t do a weekly or monthly tally; on the good side they include the actual number of searches per day.
Baidu’s rankings also offer the following:
- a scrolling list of some of today’s actual searches, interesting to watch and see what rolls by, and clickable if you see something you like.
- Top 50 Gaining Searches today. I guess these could help you track searches that have just come up even if the number of people doing the search is relatively small. For instance, today’s top gaining search is "answers to June 2006 level six" 2006年6月六级答案, or in other words, the answers to a recent test for sixth graders, with 14,212 searches. The second gaining search is "answers to English 2006 level four." Lots of students using Baidu.
- Top 50 "hot searches," which also indicates whether the search traffic is going up or down. Doesn’t say what this means, since these are not the terms with the most searches overall, necessarily. At the top of the list today is "Audition," 劲舞团, a Korean online game, with 99,448 hits and declining. Second: "Popkart Crazy Racing," also a Korean game. Third: qq (the Chinese online messaging platform). Fourth: World Cup. Fifth: mp3.
- Top Ten Hot Women, Television Shows, Games, Songs, Novels, People, Publically Traded Companies, Hot Men, Cartoons, Universities, Cars, and Scenic Places. If you look through these you’ll find searches with more traffic than the #1 "Hot Search," such as singer Jay Chou with over 206,000 today; the song "Perfume Can Be Poison" at 268,281; and actress Liu Yifei at 148,922.
Update: Jason points out that Google Zeitgeist also shows monthly results for its Chinese language searches–it’s unclear whether this is limited to .cn searches or also includes off-mainland Chinese searches. It looks like Google users really are a different group than Baidu users, older and more professional as has been suggested by the CNNIC China Online Search Market report: the political term "Eight Honors Eight Shames" 八荣八耻 is number one for April. #2: Li Yuchun, Supergirl singing contest winner; #3: Kartrider; #4:Jinshan software dictionary; #5: China Merchants Bank. Link.
A blend of performance art and clever photography: Li Wei Art.
Via PostShow.
Tag Friends is a free service that provides Flash applets for websites that allow visitors to own avatars. These avatars interact with other visitors’ avatars within in the wider Tag Friends world (or window).
Here’s ours:
Site/service given in Japanese (original), English and Simplified Chinese.
Via PostShow.
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