with billboards calling on people to “act civilized,” and not surprisingly it is the younger generations of Chinese, especially the women, who are the most responsible in their public actions, using a style and standard of behavior that combines traditional Chinese elements with Western customs.
The challenge to raise the level of public manners in China remains enormous, however, particularly because of the number of men searching for jobs and on the move throughout the country. Many of them live in the streets and are more concerned about surviving than displaying good manners.
The eating and table manners of people in ordinary restaurants and at food stalls can also inspire serious criticism by both Chinese and foreigners. This has resulted in numerous public and private institutions teaching a common-sense approach to etiquette. Charm schools catering to all ages are now big business in China. Various media outlets even sponsor contests and offer prizes designed to encourage a higher level of public behavior.
Foreign companies operating in China, as well as a growing number of Chinese companies, are now sponsoring programs to teach their employees how to interface successfully with fellow workers, government officials, customers, and the public at large. They see it as an essential element in their corporate culture, with long-term implications for their survival and success.
The China Web
No one can talk about modern China without mentioning the Internet. In the year 2000, only 25 million Chinese people were online, compared to 95 million in the US. However, by 2015, the Chinese netizen population had reached 649 million—nearly double the entire population of the US. The nature of Internet usage has also changed over the years, from young men playing online games in a darkened wang ba (wang bah), or net bars, to people of all shapes and sizes accessing the Internet from personal computers in their homes or offices, or increasingly through cell phones via the mobile Internet, in order to make friends or shop.
In its infancy, the only part of the Chinese Internet that was really Chinese were the email addresses that netizens received from their Chinese Internet service provider, which was owned by the government. Chinese netizens generally used Internet Explorer to access the World Wide Web, because that was the default browser on the Windows operating system, and they used Western search engines to find content, because Chinese search engines had not yet been developed. However, since Western companies were slow on the mark in generating products suitable for the Chinese market, in the first decade of the 21st century a host of private Chinese companies began to crop up to meet market demand.
The first of these companies to see large-scale success was Tencent, with its chat platform QQ Tencent (formally known as QQ). Within just a short time after Pony Ma opened his company in 1998, QQ Tencent became a must-have for Chinese Internet users, with many people spending hours a day on it, chatting and playing games. Though QQ Tencent has been surpassed in popularity by other Chinese Internet apps and portals, it is still one of the largest and most popular chat clients in the world. Indeed, it set a world record by having 210,212,085 simultaneous users online in July 2014.
China is an exceedingly large country, which can make it difficult for businesses to reach customers and vice versa. To overcome this obstacle, in 1999 entrepreneur Jack Ma set up Alibaba. In the beginning, Alibaba was just a B2B portal. However, within China there is not a very clear distinction B2B, B2C, and C2C, so when eBay entered the Chinese market by buying the Chinese e-commerce portal EachNet for $150 million in 2003, Jack Ma felt that he had to respond defensively to protect his company. As a result, he started Taobao (ta-oh ba-oh), initially as a C2C marketplace, but later expanding it to offer B2C services as well. Through his drive and his superior understanding of the Chinese market, Ma destroyed his competition, forcing eBay to all but withdraw from the Chinese market in 2006. Essentially, eBay wrote off its entire $150 million investment. Through Taobao and its other merchandising portals, for the fiscal year ending in March 2015, Alibaba had a total gross merchandise volume of $554 billion. Presently, Alibaba sells more goods than Amazon and eBay combined, and the vast majority of this business is solely within China.
It can be difficult for Western companies to compete with Chinese companies when it comes to Chinese-language web-navigation and content, which is why Baidu (by-doo) quickly became China’s number 1 search engine after it was established in the year 2000. It currently boasts over 1 billion visits a month.
The Chinese government sees control over the Internet within China as necessary for state security, at times blocking Western web-sites because it cannot control their content. This has proven to be a boon for some Chinese companies. Arguably, for example, Baidu has profited from Google’s problems with the Chinese government, though to be fair Baidu was already a successful company with a large share of the search market before Google’s troubles began.
In 2009, however, the Chinese government blocked Facebook and Twitter, because these had become vehicles for spreading news about anti-government riots and demonstrations. A Chinese company, Sina Corporation, jumped into the gap, creating Sina Weibo (sie-nah wayboh), a microblogging platform which combines many of the best attributes of Twitter and Facebook. Sina Weibo quickly became the most popular microblogging platform in China. By 2010, Sina Weibo had won 86.6% of the time China’s netizens spent online.
For a long time, the conversations on Sina Weibo were free-spirited and more often than not politically incorrect, and many Chinese netizens depended upon Sina Weibo for news and entertainment. However, under pressure from the government, Sina Weibo began to take steps to gain control over what was posted, and now up to 12% of its content is censored. Increasingly, as well, it began to run advertisements and paid content. The overall effect was to drive away many users, who have migrated to WeChat, which is called Weixin (way-sheen) in Chinese. WeChat is a phone app that was introduced in 2011 by Tencent. It provides chat, text messaging, the ability to broadcast (like Twitter), and the sharing of videos and photos with friends. As of May 2015, WeChat had 549 million active users worldwide (100 million outside of China), and the average Chinese person spent 40 minutes a day on WeChat.
The Chinese Internet is a rough and freewheeling world, full of arguments and discussions between strangers and friends, much like a typical Chinese teahouse must have been 100 years ago. To illustrate the freewheeling nature of the Chinese Internet, one term that has become common in discussion threads is shafa (shah-fah), which literally means “sofa”. In a typical discussion thread on the Chinese Internet, the first person to comment claims the “sofa”, as it is the best and most comfortable seat in the house from which to observe the verbal fracas that will inevitably occur.
Of course, not all of the Chinese Internet is happy-go-lucky. One disturbing trend are human flesh search engines, or renrou sousuo (ren-roh soh-suah). This is the Chinese Internet equivalent of a lynch mob. Human flesh search engines feed the need for justice in a country where so often the rich, the powerful, and the well connected can do anything they want without repercussions, even committing murder. The mob sets upon its victim with unmatched fury, putting the victim’s address, phone number, private photos, and intimate details on the Internet for all to see as a form of public humiliation. This phenomenon became so marked that famed Chinese director Chen Kaige even made a film about it (Caught in the Web). Fortunately, human search flesh engines have become less common in recent years.
What has not become less common are the activities of the 50-cent army, or the wumao dang (woo-ma-oh-dang). These are mostly university students working freelance for the government, posing as genuine commentators on Chinese social media, but with the purpose of promoting Communist propaganda, steering debate away from controversial topics, disparaging the US, and inculcating patriotism and love of the Communist Party. According to legend, they are paid wumao, or fifty Chinese cents, for every post they make. As it turns out, they are paid considerably less than this, but the name has stuck. No one knows for certain how many paid trolls are in this “army”, but it is thought to range in the hundreds of thousands. This is but one of several means that the government uses to try to control online discussion.
