China’s Parallel Cyberspace

Hu Yuan’s smartphone is a good example of China’s parallel Internet ecosystem. In the Xiaomi phone of this young entrepreneur from eastern Jiangsu province, only one application belongs to Google: Google Translate. There is no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, no Whatsapp and no YouTube. These are all blocked in the world’s most populous country. But Hu is not missing anything these applications offer. She chats with friends and shares her photos on WeChat (called Weixin in China), reposts and comments news on Weibo and watches videos on Youku and iQiyi. To a foreigner, many other apps like these in her phone would feel completely alien because they cater exclusively to the Chinese public, Most of these China-developed apps count their users in the hundreds of millions and count their income in billions of renminbi.

Some may say Chinese companies have grown to become giants by copying their Western counterparts, and that’s partly true. “The fact that many foreign apps are banned in China is definitely one of the reasons why Chinese services have been so successful,” says Alvaro Alfaro, a Spanish technology reporter based in Beijing. “Apart from having total control over information (which Chinese law requires to be stored in Chinese servers), creating an ecosystem that allows local companies to innovate is one of the main goals of the Great Firewall,” he adds.

With over 800 million avid Internet users to boost their businesses and favourable