According to the New York Times:

China has issued a sweeping directive requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include sophisticated software that can filter out pornography and other “unhealthy information” from the Internet.

The software, which manufacturers must install on all new PCs starting July 1, would allow the government to regularly update computers with an ever-changing list of banned Web sites.
…..
Zhang Chenming, general manager of Jinhui Computer System Engineering, a company that helped create Green Dam, said worries that the software could be used to censor a broad range of content or monitor Internet use were overblown. He insisted that the software, which neutralizes programs designed to override China’s so-called Great Firewall, could simply be deleted or temporarily turned off by the user. “A parent can still use this computer to go to porn,” he said.

If it is true, as Zhang Chenming says, that the software can be turned off, then what is the point? If, as the Wall Street Journal reports, that the software just has to be included on a CD with new computers that can simply be thrown away, then what is the point? If the Green Dam software can simply be deleted, and of course will not be included with computers that users build themselves from parts, then what is the point? I assume that the major PC manufactures (Dell, Lenovo, etc.) will go along with this rather than lose out on the market, but this all serves to once again make China look bad regarding freedom of speech and information to the international community.

Also, before anyone gets very upset about this, I think it is worth reading Rebecca MacKinnon’s measured response to this:

As the week progresses I’m putting more of my money on the likelihood that the Green Dam filtering software edict will not get implemented, or efforts at enforcement will fade quickly. One thing Western observers need to remember is that China has a long history of edicts targeted at the tech, telecoms, and media sectors going un-enforced, quietly retracted, or morphed in practice into something very different. There was the failed attempt to ban encryption software back in 2000. There were multiple failed attempts to force Reuters, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, etc. to sell all their news exclusively through Xinhua. Both were defeated by strong lobbying by international industry groups. The effort to impose a real-name registration requirement on Chinese Internet companies died after fierce opposition from Chinese industry. And last year’s new requirement that online video websites in China must have majority state ownership appears to have gone ignored. Etc.

Further Reading
New York Times: China Requires Censorship Software on New PCs
Wall Street Journal: China Squeezes PC Makers
R Conversation: China’s “Green Dam Youth Escort” software
China Digital Times: Microsoft: China Web Filtering Raises Issues

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From our friends at the Internet Society of China and Internet News Research Center, China selects top 10 Internet-related events of 2007:

1. Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) proposed new requirements for Internet construction and management.
2. The national Internet culture construction and management work conference was held from June 3 to 4, 2007
3. Websites for the first time broadcast the CPC’s five-yearly national congress
4. By December 2007, the number of Chinese netizens had reached 210 million, 73 million more than that at the end of 2006
5. Ten governmental departments jointly cracked down on online pornographic spread. A batch of criminal suspects were arrested.
6. The Internet Society of China opened an anti-spam processing platform (iscbl.anti-spam.cn)
7. The Internet Society of China released a “self-discipline code for blog services”, as China had more than 70 million blogs at that time. The code, first of its kind in China, will play a significant role for blog development in China
8. The country’s 188 websites jointly launched an online product contest
9. One million university students heard expert’s lectures online synchronously
10. 11 China’s [sic] major websites opened online classroom for various topics. By December 2007, more than 330 lectures had been given and more than 100 million netizens hit the online classroom

Wow, what an incredibly boring, obliviously state sponsored list!

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The blog indexing and searching website Technorati as of yesterday, and possibly earlier, is now unblocked. I also noticed yesterday that another site that I had been working on, a site that had been blocked immediately after I purchased the domain name, is now also unblocked. This appears to be part of a wave of blocking/unblocking that occasionally happens in China. Has anyone else noticed any changes?

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In case you have not heard information related to the new Chinese video game anti-addiction system

Under government rules that went into effect Monday, Chinese Internet gaming companies must implement a screening program that requires users to enter their identification card numbers.

The program then monitors the online time of players identified as under 18 and prompts them at the three-hour mark with a message asking them to stop and “do suitable physical exercise.”

The software monitor slashes by half the points of underage players if they keep playing beyond three hours, and wipes their points out completely if they stay on more than five hours.

This article seems to be written by a journalist who has little understanding of how gaming works. Assuming that they are talking about an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, by points do they means experience points? Because if this is the case those who have hit the level cap, meaning the highest level possible in the game, experience points do not matter to them and the restrictions would be pointless (hehe). Or does it means your characters stats, his abilities in the game? That would be a more effective method but still seems as though it would be difficult to implement. I have not seen in any source how this system specifically works.

The Chinese government is also considering penalizing companies who do not comply with these rules. OF course shouldn’t these penalties already be in place since the law requires them to have these systems. The video game company The9 has already put this policy in place for the games it runs.

Zhao Yurun, public relations director of the The9, which runs WoW in China, said, “We have installed the anti-addiction system on all games, including WoW, the Soul Ultimate Nation and the Fantastic Melody Online.”

An official with General Administration of Press and Publications said officials were still discussing penalties for firms that had failed to install the anti-addiction system, a GAPP official said.

Overall, here are the questions that I have about this system

And gaming companies must not have been thrilled about this policy. For them there is no choice, either abide by the rules or don’t do business in China. I personally don’t see this as much of a solution to the problem, as kids who want to spend 8 hours a day playing these games will find a way to do it somehow.

More News on Video Game Addiction in China
Death Sentence for Online Gamer
World of Warcraft China Explained
Wikipedia: Video Games in the People’s Republic of China
Shanghai Treats Online Addiction

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At some point the world realized that China becoming richer also means that more Chinese people would be coming online. And that many new people online from one culture will change the face of the internet.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project just recently released a report written by Deborah Fallows entitled China’s Online Population Explosion. While this is mostly just a rehash of statistics that have already been reported by the CNNIC and other sources, it is a good summation of the current state of Chinese internet users with an eye forward for things to come. One of the major areas that she details as a new area for growth is with the peasant farmer population, and as they become more aware of computer technologies and feel more comfortable around them. This group currently has the least access to the internet and lacks the skills to know how to use it. This will all change in the coming years.

The point that is touched upon, and may be on of the most important, is how the government will respond to this increasing internet usage among its population. Although it is hard to say how this will turn out in the end, this may be the most important issue of all. The desire by the government to control information on the Internet in China becomes especially important when talking about the peasant population. This large group should have a different view of modern China then the educated middle class values that are currently expressed online, and we shall see how their experiences and their access to new information is handled by the government.

One point that Fallows brings up that hadn’t occurred to me before is the ability of the internet to allow Chinese speakers of with different dialects to communicate more effectively. Of course this once again effects the uneducated more then the educated, as the educated should be able to speak putonghua or close enough to be understood by everyone. But the idea of a farmer from Anhui being able to chat online with a farmer from Guangdong is quite inspiring.

To view more information contained in the report, the full version can be read in PDF format.

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As featured on Search Engine Land, a recent article, Chinese Eye Tracking Study: Baidu Vs Google, showed that Chinese internet users eyes scan search results differently then American users. While most American users eyes travel in the familiar “F” shaped pattern, the Chinese users were much more spread out, and “There appear to be no consistent patterns.” Also Chinese users tend to spend, on average, more time on a page, 30 seconds on Google and 55 seconds on Baidu, as opposed to Americans who spend about 8-10 seconds on Google.

Interesting findings. It mentions this may have something to do with how characters are processed, as it takes more scanning of the information to acquire meaning and that accounts for the more varied results. I also wonder if this seemingly random scanning of a page is the reason for the chaotic nature of Chinese web design. This seems like a subject that needs more research to be done about it.

And if you are unfamilar with eye tracking studies, check out F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content.

Related RedKemp:
Chinese Web Design
China Internet News Update

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Something that I have been examining lately is the differences in Chinese and American website design. This translated article from a few months ago US Internet companies’ top 10 mistakes in China is overall very worth reading, even if you do not agree with all of its points. A section titled “Clean and elegant v.s. Crowded and noisy appearance” was the most interesting to me, and probably the area of Chinese web sites that I least understand.

By the first look at a website, you can usually guess the origin of the site even without knowing its background. US websites are clean, simple, arrogant but beautiful. They hide the good stuff inside, and believe the concept of “don’t be afraid of letting customer find you good stuff”. It seems to be the taste of an international company. Although loved by 20% of the hign-end users, 80% of average users will just exit after a quick view of its cold and calm design.

Their Chinese competitors, on the other side, put vivid banners floating around, pile up all the good stuff into the front page, and disregard the importance of elegant design.

Even today, the ex-Yahoo employees show no respect to hao123.com-a simple to death page with a horrible design of putting tons of links all together. But only a few years ago, Yahoo tried to make a portal with 1 billion bucks, dozens of MBA and returnee, elites from HK and TW. But they were pathetically defeated by a junior high graduate in Guangdong. He single handed created and maintained hao123.com with zero marketing expense. A few years ago, it leads in all PVs, UVs, and advertising metrics way ahead of Yahoo.

I have some problems with some of the above, like that I don’t think most usability people would agree that they are really “hiding” anything, there is certainly something to the clean vs. chaotic dichotomy here. The example that is given above, hao123.com, is a remarkably ugliest website.

The other highest traffic websites in China, such as QQ and Sina, the #2 and #3 popular sites in China according to Alexa, are of a similar nature. When I look at these pages I have a hard time focusing on anything, and feel confused as to where to go first. Even the more information heavy main pages in America, such as Yahoo, are not nearly this packed full of stuff. Where is the all important white space? But the popularity of such sites has to be indication that something that Chinese users are looking for in a webpage are featured in these sites. In an interesting piece over at Virtual China from last year entitled Chinese and English language website design about the role of text on a site and how the role of the language effects the design, there was something mentioned in the comment section that caught my eye:

a few months ago I talked to the founder of a very famous web 2.0 service here in China and I asked him why isn’t the site more simple like it’s english language counterpart.

He gave me an explanation like this: that chinese people need the chaotic design to stick to a page, in Chinese peoples mind[sic] it means that somethings going on on the page, ( a friend of mine said that too ) if it’s simple they may think awww this is empty, nothing you can do here.

Of course there are exceptions to these ideas, but based on my experiences with websites from both places it seems to be true. Do you think it is a genuine cultural difference of how people like to get thier information or more so how the industry has developed in the two countries? Frankly really don’t know the answer, but I find it pretty fascinating. And it is something that will have to be better understood in order for foreign business to be successful with Chinese internet users.

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I just wanted to mention the new Google Universal Search that was just released on the 16th. If you go to the Google home page you will now notice that the tabs over the search box have now moved to the the top left corner and have morphed into drop down navigational links. Search Engine Land does a way better job of explaining this then I ever could, but the basic idea behind universal search is that it seeks to take the information from other specialized search categories such as books, news, and video and blends that into the main search results page. This is good for people who never use these categories anyway, and doesn’t effect the people who use the special vertical categories. Overall, nice job Google on making changes without breaking anything.

Chinese Google still has the old layout and I don’t know if they plan on implementing this new system anytime soon. And something I just noticed today, try doing a side-by-side comparison of Google and Baidu and see how they look almost exactly the same.

Also worth checking out is this newish meta search engine Sputtr

Related RedKemp:
No Google Video in China
Online Chinese Translation Inconsistencies
China Internet News Update

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A few things that I have seen having to do with the Internet in China.

Internet too expensive for most Chinese
A recent study done by the World Bank that found that Internet Users in China spend tens times more for internet service then do people in developed countries. According to this report citizens in developed countries only spend 1% of their income on internet fees. Do these numbers include prices at internet cafes in China?

Outlook For Search in China
This came out last month but i just ran across it now. Baidu leads all other search companies by far, 62.1% of the market share, with Google in a distance second. However Google has preformed under certain tests to be a better system then Baidu. The article says the company to look out for in the coming year is Tencent, maker of the ubiquitous QQ messaging system, as it begins to enter the search market.

Shanda to run Chinese ‘Second Life’
One of biggest Chinese gaming companies plans on making a Second Life like game. I will never understand the appeal of this game, as when I play online games I prefer having a sword, possibly an ax, and to be battling elves. This is much like my non-enjoyment of the insanely popular Sims franchise. The only time I played it my person peed their pants and then died. Is this fun? But anyway, many people seem to really enjoy it, and I think a similar game will be huge in China. Just don’t expect the weird sexual interactions that the American version has.

11-Year-Old Gamer Already Married 3 Times
This is just silly:

One 11-year-old player of Netease’s (Nasdaq: NTES) MMORPG Fantasy Westward Journey told Beijing Morning Post that he has been virtually married three times to other players in the game. A survey taken at the player’s school showed that 14 percent of his primary school classmates have married in online games at least twice.

Update:
An interesting experiment at Mutant Palm testing Tencent’s new search engine on a certain touchy subject.

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The CNNIC just released new internet usage numbers for China. Lyn Jeffery at Virtual China summarized the major points of the report.

* 137 million Internet users, a 23% growth rate in 2006, compared with just above 18% growth rate in both 2005 and 2004
* 10.5% Internet penetration rate
* over 30% of Beijing’s population is online
* the .CN domain name grew at a rate of over 64% compared to 2005 (probably still fewer in total than .COM, would be my guess). China is said to be entering “the .CN era”
* 75% of Internet users are using broadband connections (xDSL, cable modem, or leased line)
* a bit above 12% of Internet users, or 17 million, have accessed the Internet through their mobile phones (compared to 13 million in July 2006)
* mobile Internet users are primarily male, unmarried, aged 18-24, work in an enterprise, and live in cities and towns
* 72% of mobile Internet users are mainly going online to send and receive email, while 31% are browsing news
* biggest issues for mobile Internet users are the high price and slow connection speed

Of course this makes the post I did on Chinese bloggers somewhat outdated.

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