internet - 10 years online: China is only starting

(tomorrow at Tidbits)

This month China celebrates the tenth anniversary of being online and the verdicts about what is has achieved differ very much. Yesterday I taught a class of 60 students of the prestigious Fudan university and most of them spend one or two hours per day online, while only a couple maintained a weblog and an online presence. Quite limited compared to their US counterparts. For Chinese companies the internet is hardly existing and most even do not bother to register a domain name.
Yet, with 80 million internet users, a quarter using a broadband connection, China has the largest presence online, second only after the US. Telecom providers expand the internet in high speed, looking at it rather as a utility than as a way to maximize profit.
While volunteers still keep an eye on discussion in chat rooms, and occasionally interfere, the internet has also become a tool for the government to listen to its citizens. Chinese are learning how to talk online and also the rest of the world will hear from them. The message might be that of an 80 million selected few netizens, but they are talking – and we might not always like what they are saying, there is no way to stop them.