Ghettoization of the Chinese Internet?

Yesterday, amidst reports and rumors that Facebook will soon enter China, I lamented that Facebook's new domestic Chinese version will have to censor their users' content as heavily as all the other domestic Chinese social networking services, blog-hosting services, and other user-generated content service providers.  Thus Facebook won't be able to seamlessly integrate their Chinese service into the international Facebook network, which is a shame given that Facebook is full of Chinese speakers. 

I argued that this is part of the ghettoization of the mainland Chinese Internet, thanks to the Chinese government's censorship and filtering practices.

As further evidence of this ghettoization, Shanghaiist and others pointed me to several links that I missed over the past few days while buried in some other work. They all relate to research by Hong Kong City University professor Jonathan Zhu, who finds that only six percent of hyperlinks on mainland Chinese websites link to overseas websites:

• Thomas Crampton: China's Internet rarely links to foreign websites
• Tobias Escher: The Internet is local and Chinese do not link abroad
• Blognation: Are We Sealing Ourselves In? Only 6% of Chinese Sites Link to Foreign Sites

 

Blognation theorizes that there are two main reasons for this statistic - aside from the language barrier:

• For legal reasons: China’s Internet law regarding Internet news forbids links to foreign news sites on mainland Chinese news sites unless Chinese State Council approval is obtained. Some sites spell out the URL of a foreign site (or even a domestic site), but they leave out the A HREF hyperlink. (The legal basis behind this is provided by Article 14 of the Interim Regulations Regarding News Services on Internet Websites — a 2000 law.)

• For geo-network reasons: If I’m not totally mistaken, the Web inside China feels more like an intranet. Why is it that I can access any local website “just like that” (click and go — truer words could not be uttered!), whereas a click on a link outside Chinese frontiers can create waits of up to 20 — sometimes even 30 — seconds and more? In fact, at some universities, access to sites located outside of geographical mainland China is blocked, period. (My blog! There goes my blog hosted on servers in the US!)

In the comments thread below that blog post, some people think the results as being mainly caused by the language barrier. But another commentor writing from the U.S. writes:

I don’t think that language is the major barrier. There are many chinese language sites fom outside china that my wife (who is native chinese) only started visiting after leaving china. Part of it has to do with which sites are promoted within china. Its not surprising that local content is promoted (via newspaper,signs,text messages, etc.) more than foreign content, if you are not aware of a foreign chinese website how can you visit those sites. Of course, you could search for the external content assuming that the search engine you use will look for sites outside china (google china isn’t exactly the same as normal google and if the chinese gov’t is feeling unhappy you might get redirected to baidu.) but the external sites might actually be too far down the list of links to be bothered with.
Its easier for locals to find local content, so that is what they go with. That might not be true if there was a real choice

My own view is that language barrier is indeed non-trivial. But it is dramatically exacerbated by the other policy factors.

(See my recent post China's Censorship 2.0 and Reporters Without Borders' Journey to the heart of Internet censorship for more details about how the Chinese government gets web companies and their staffs to shoulder much of the work when it comes to domestic Internet censorship.)

Comments

[Kempton]

I think the language barrier is an important factor. Linking to an English site would probably be done rarely unless the blogger is absolutely sure that his/her readers have a good command of the English language.

Other factors may include self-censorship to avoid any potential trouble.

Just my 2 cents on this. Thanks for blogging about this.