Chinese Internet: like behind a stone wall

    The Internet in the Middle Kingdom is a controversial thing, surrounded by myths and not yet fully understood by the West. The Chinese Internet, or Sinet, can only be compared with UFOs: everyone knows about it, but few people saw it live.

    Myths about Sineta

    Most of the Internet inhabitants of the planet Earth believe that the Chinese Internet is a bulwark of network censorship. They not only block websites that are objectionable to the government, but they also catch bloggers, Internet dissidents, Tibetan lamas and Falun Gong sectarians, beat them with sticks on the kidneys and put them in secret prisons, periodically shooting them for prevention. We can add to this a high level of piracy and a huge amount of spam sent to our poor heads.

    What else do we “know” about Sinet? Here is the largest number of Internet users in the world (more than 221 million people), and every fourth of them has a blog. Ah, yes, of course, all Chinese users write under their own names, and if someone uses a pseudonym, then an “OMON” outfit will immediately be sent in his direction.

    Undoubtedly, all Chinese people use one search engine - Baidu.com. And if some impudent person tries another search engine (for example, Google), he will be transferred to Baidu anyway. To the heap, Yandex is also blocked here, so as not to relax.

    On this, I want to end the list of stereotypes about the Chinese Internet, but you can continue it at your leisure.


    Where did it start

    China has always sought to be a world leader, to become a "nation of the 21st century," to overtake and overtake the eldest brother of the USSR and the capitalist enemy - the United States. To develop a promising Internet - seemed like a natural step towards the "conquest" of superiority around the world.

    The historical opening date of the Chinese Internet is considered September 20, 1987, when Professor Qian Tianbai of the Beijing Computer Science Research Institute sent the first email from China as part of the CANET (Chinese Academic Network) project. Then they did not catch spam (now they treat letters from Chinese IP very suspiciously) and the message was delivered to the addressee, it read: “Through the Great Wall - access to the world”.

    The irony of fate - now the Great Wall of China, or the Great Firewall of China is associated not with “access to the world”, but rather with Internet censorship.

    With the assistance of educational institutions in Germany and Canada, the Chinese Internet has developed rapidly. As early as October 1990, the Chinese .cn domain zone was registered. And in the same year, the email service from this domain zone was officially opened.

    Time passed, connection speed grew, and Sinet became available not only to educational institutions, but also to civilians. By 1997, there were more than 290 thousand personal computers, 620 thousand Internet users, 4066 domains in the .cn zone, and 1.5 thousand sites in China. Two years later, there were approximately 4 million users, 30 thousand domains and 10 thousand sites. In 2007, there were over 5 million Chinese domains.

    Briefly about Great Firewall of China

    Western corporations, seeing the fast-growing Chinese market, rushed to collect the cream of profit in the Internet field. The government already then spotted not only the prospect, but also the potential danger of the Internet. They say that IBM and CISCO went to the same deal to enter the Chinese market. It is about creating the Great Firewall of China - a search engine and an Internet filter developed with the participation of the two companies mentioned, and partly Yahoo. And they can be understood, so they would not have been given life in the huge Chinese market.

    The local population only has time to shake their heads, once again bumping into a blocked page. Yes, you need to guess that the page is locked. This in the Middle East honestly warns about the opened stub page about blocked sites. There is no such thing in the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese firewall is distinguished by selectivity, surprise and cunning.

    Chinese Firewall is not only an insidious Internet filter, but also a search engine with a huge vocabulary in several languages ​​of the world (the Russian dictionary presumably consists of 1000 words and phrases). Often, the site is not blocked throughout the PRC, but gradually, which spreads excitement among visiting foreigners.

    Ben writes to Bob: does he have Wikipedia open?
    Bob answers, “Yes.”
    “It's strange, but I don't,” says Ben.

    If there are about five such Benovs, then we can confidently say that tomorrow the news about the next blocked site in China will circulate the entire Internet. Until last year, GreatFirewallofChina.org could check which sites were blocked in China, but now this test does not work.

    Of course, getting around filters is not a problem. Sinet is full of articles like “21 ways to get around GFW”, “How to open Wikipedia”, etc. Sometimes an attempt to bypass the filter is punishable. Punished for indicative purposes, so that others would not be habituated.

    Indigenous users have already developed a certain slang, so as not to fall into the attention of Big Brother. The words “Falun Gong”, “Jiang Zemin”, “Communism”, “Tibet”, “Taiwan” in combination with the words “freedom” or “independence” are hardly used. And if applied, then the modified forms of these words.

    For example, it’s not customary to say “I am banned by Chinese censorship”, they say “I am GFWed!”. Or “I was harmonized” - a verb from “harmony”, in Chinese “he sie”; the word’s origin is connected with some report “On the Harmonious Development of the Country, the Media and the Internet”, the essence of which is the closure of objectionable newspapers and websites.

    But Big Brother is also on the alert, now he is looking for references to “harmony”, and users, meanwhile, began to use the Chinese homonym - the word “cancer”.

    But this is the Chinese web underground, in reality, everything is simpler. Any Wikipedia, Google, Flickr, Livejournal here has its own, “right” replacement.

    Google and Wikipedia in the furnace!

    The most popular Chinese search engine, Baidu (http://baidu.com), is known to all. True, this is not only a search engine for sites, images, videos and music. It is also a separate search for people with disabilities, children, searches on documents, books, blogs, news, geographical searches (addresses), searches on the hard drive, on government sites, etc.

    I’ll say separately about the search for music on Baida - it gives direct working links to media files. It is so good that it is already blocked in the USA. And you say - Chinese Firewall!

    In addition, Baidu is a large social platform (web2.0 and all that). The following services are combined under one account:

    Baidu . Space - blog and photo album;
    Baidupediya is a free and “right” encyclopedia;
    Baidu.Posts - numerous forums on various topics, with photo albums of participants. Everyone can create a forum;
    Baidu. Bookmarks - social bookmarks on the necessary websites, search queries, etc .;
    Baidu. I know - a question and answer service, quite popular and successful;
    Baidu.
    Dating Baidu. Money - payment system;
    Baidu. News - a news aggregator, such as Yandex.News;
    Baidu.Finance and Baidu.Index - a huge number of financial services for tracking trends on the stock exchange, securities index;
    Baidu. Download - own file-sharing system;
    Baidu. Games - online multiplayer RPGs, strategies, races;

    Baidu also has its own map service - Baidu. Map. Again, the "correct", without any secret military bases and submarines near Taiwan.

    I'm not talking about the toolbar, Internet pager, antivirus and electronic dictionary. In general, why do I need Wikipedia or Google.Maps when I have everything my own, native and understandable.

    Empire e-commerce

    About Alibaba (http://www.alibaba.cn) in RuNet has been repeatedly mentioned. First of all, it is the world's largest B2B platform with its Alipay payment system (https://alipay.com) and an Internet pager. Alibaba has more than one thousand companies in search of suppliers, partners and customers. But this "movie is not for everyone", but only for legal entities.

    For everyone else, there is an Alibaba “daughter” - Taobao (http://taobao.com). This is China's largest online store and B2C / C2C online auction. If almost no one heard about Amazon and eBay in the Middle Kingdom, then they shoot an advertising series about Taobao, where the plot of each series is reduced to buying another item in this online store. And there you can buy almost everything: from clothing, electronics and furniture to accessories of the sex industry, medicines and antiques.

    Everyone can create a store on Taobao. You can sell anything that does not violate the laws of the PRC. The site has a complex rating system and credit of trust for both sellers and buyers. And most importantly, competition. That allows you to choose a high-quality and cheap product on the site.

    "Taobao" has a wild popularity in the Middle Kingdom. For example, walking through a regular market, you will notice the Taobao store site and QQ number on the signs of individual retail stores.

    Great Chinese Penguin

    No, not Red Flag Linux, but the national QQ Internet pager (http://www.qq.com). It is also known as OICQ, Tencent Messenger. The image of the QQ penguin is so ingrained in the minds of Chinese users that the qq-number is often called "van hao" (Internet number). You may not have an e-mail, but everyone should have QQ. An ancient Chinese sign says: the loss of a QQ number is in trouble. And the next Chinese copy of Toyota was called QQ.

    What can I say! - My friend was reprimanded when he did not appear at the meeting, which was reported in the QQ-group. Fortunately, recently QQ began to be blocked at workplaces, which made it possible to develop alternative instant messengers.

    However, this is "not just a messenger." The Chinese love everything to the maximum, so you get - music, games on the Web, a payment system, a kind of “tamogochi”, blogs, etc. Isn't it strange that official customers weigh between 25 and 60 megabytes. And the advertising palette reaches the end: pop-ups, banners in messages, qq-spam.

    You can guess that Big Brother is watching you here too. They are also copied with special slang in QQ, upon registration they are required to enter real information, up to the ID number, otherwise they may “harmonize”.

    Social boom

    The popularity of social networks has not spared China. The most famous social networks are Xiaonei (http://xiaonei.com) and Hainei (http://hainei.com). Both belong to the same owner, both are similar to Facebook and to each other. What distinguishes them is just the name: the first is translated as “at school”, the second is “at sea” (by the sea life is meant). Nothing like Russian clones?

    In China, they are not as successful as Facebook, and QQ still drives - but still ahead.

    Varezu - yes!

    The Chinese government has stepped up the fight against Internet piracy. Closed or become paid Chinese warez sites, once popular in the West, EnFull, FullDown, FixDown, where you could download not only the "cracks", but the full retail versions of paid programs.

    But bt and ed2k file-sharing networks are very popular and widely developed. Developments are underway over national substitutes, for example, Blin.cn (http://blin.cn), which is claimed to be 50 times faster than BitTorrent.

    * * *

    In conclusion, I want to say that Sinet is self-sufficient and can easily do without Western sites. YouTube alone accounts for more than 20 Chinese counterparts. Services similar to Last.fm have long been provided by QQ and Baidu.

    In the future, when China takes over the whole world, it will be difficult for us to live without the Chinese Internet, and not for him without us.

    This article was written by me specifically for the Web Planet , I decided to make cross-post here.

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