Debate on the contemporary identity of the Chinese - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Sociologist Tricia Wang just finished her 106th day in seclusion, trying to write down her thoughts on seven years of China field work. Today she discussed the "sense of self" among Chinese citizens, and opens an important debate on her weblog. 

Tricia Wang:

Day 106 #synthesisnow - #deepchina edited by Arthur Kleinman. This is a really great book by some of the most amazing researchers on the self in contemporary China, like Yun Xiangyuan. So many freaking goodies in here but I disagree with their overall argument. They’re saying that modern changes like capitalism & individualism are creating a divided sense of the self among Chinese citizens. This is true for older generations, but absolutely not true at all for the Internet Generation. They are not feeling divided because they are doing crazy shit online in secret spaces under anonymous identities. They are expressing an#elasticself - but you wouldn’t know unless you dig even deeper to the secret spaces where youth are expressing themselves.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

+China Weekly Hangout
Is education a goldmine or a black hole? The China Weekly Hangout discussed in February 2013  +Andrew Hupert, formerly working for the NYU Shanghai campus, and +Paul Fox, lecturer at the HKU School of Professional and Continuing Education. They joined +Fons Tuinstra, president of the +China Speakers Bureau
.

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Why WeChat works better in China - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Cultural settings define the success of internet tools often better than technical limitations. That explains why Chinese internet users prefer censored search engine Baidu over Google, and why WeChat works better in China than some might think, writes sociologist Tricia Wang on her weblog. 

Tricia Wang:

In a society with very restrictive social norms around permissive interaction and self-expression, Chinese youth don't have a lot of opportunity to meet new people outside of formal contexts or to express themselves. 

So the quasi-anonymity of the internet provides a space for youth to explore emotions with strangers - emotions that they don't feel that they can share offline with people they know like friends and family. There's a bunch of social structural reasons for this that I won't get into here. But the important thing I realized was the extent to which youth spend time online interacting with what we would call strangers - and really strangers is not an appropriate word because some of these relationships become very meaningful. 

I don't see user practices around We Chat as an example of communication becoming less personal [as some say WeChat is less personal than others]. 

Rather I see youth trying to find ways to personalize communication. Texting is more personal than talking for Chinese youth - it's easier for them to share emotions over words than voice (also less expensive and more accessible)What is interesting is that they are trying to fulfill a desire for a more personal connection in what seems to be a very impersonal way (i.e. talking to strangers). But for them, a more impersonal connection with a stranger presents the greatest chance for personal connection. These apps allow a more continuous connection and in the case of We Chat - it's not just connections with personal ties, but also strangers!The analogy I use is a bar - and that some apps are a lot of like third spaces, spaces outside of home (first space) and work (second space). The informality of a bar widens what is considered permissive behavior. When you walk into a bar, you can be anyone - you have no institutional or personal ties attached to you. We go to bars to meet strangers but also to be a stranger. We all need informal third spaces where we can chill in the company of unknown others.  And in the same way, we also need similar spaces online. 

Some software environments are very formal (prescriptive behavior, primarily personal ties), but some software environments are more informal - and it is in these informal online spaces that people gravitate towards when they want to explore a self outside of prescriptive ties. In Chinese society where there are VERY limited options for self expression, online third spaces like We Chat are a place where self-exploration feels safe for Chinese youth. 

Also as an aside, the discovery of "why X Chinese app is surprisingly better than X Western app" is something I am hearing more often lately.

More on Tricia Wang's weblog "Bytes-of-China".

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau.Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form. 

China's internet companies are trying to go global, finding cultural barriers compared to the problems Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Groupon and others found in China. The China Weekly Hangout discussed on November 15, 2012 with +Steven Millward  of Tech in Asia, and +Fons Tuinstra  of the +China Speakers Bureau  about Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba and other Chinese internet companies exploring the world. Main conclusion: most larger companies are positioning themselves in Southeast Asia, Baidu is collecting 500 million USD in bonds for purchases, but not too much is happening yet. The China Weekly Hangout is a weekly feature, discussing this week the bird flu and what China has learned since SARS, now ten years ago. A full overview of previous hangouts, you can see here. 

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Tech woman to watch, Huffinton Post - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

The Huffington Post published a "Women to Watch" segment on women in tech, including our cultural sociologist Tricia Wang, currently writing a book on her experience in China. "Everyone knows that you don't ask someone what their anonymous name is."

The Huffington Post"

Tricia Wang is a cultural sociologist. She's studying how people use technology there, but not the early adopters of iOS 6 or the folks excited by the "floating" TV at CES. Instead, these are the users of imitation "shanzhai" phones, the immigrants who sleep in Internet cafes, the working-class commuters who rent DVD players for hourlong trains rides. 

Wang is a rising star in pop-academia; her Instagram photos (and wonderful commentary) have been featured in Fast Company, while the Atlantic has glommed onto her notes on Weibo, China's Twitter-analogue. But perhaps her most interesting observations are on the (lack of) a culture of trust in China. In an interview with Canvas8, she talks about how China's "history of people trying to rat each other out"has made Internet culture there surprisingly intricate and difficult to navigate. 

"If you have a bad day, you don't put that on Renren [China's Facebook] – you create an anonymous account on a different site," she said in the interview. "There are all these other social networks where people participate in these anonymous groups. And everyone knows that you don't ask someone what their anonymous name is."

More (other women to watch) in the Huffington Post.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

The China Weekly Hangout will discuss this Thursday the new gateways for Chinese to Europe, with a focus on Cyprus. Read our announcement here, or register for this event here. 

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Why banning China censors from the US is wrong - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

A petition asking not to issue US visa to China's censors or others "blocking people on the internet" made sociologist Tricia Wang angry, very angry. In AlJazeera the explains why closing the borders in the name of openness is not a good idea.

Tricia Wang:

I am shocked that someone from the US State Department is circulating this petition, listing their affiliation, and making it appear as if the US State Department approved the petition. This person forwarded it to the listserv without a disclaimer that circulation does not suggest US government’s endorsement. This person also pointed out that the petition needs 92,204 more signatures to reach its goal. While this person did not explicitly endorse the petition, these actions suggest endorsement. 

But even more troubling than a semi-official circulation is the idea that we should be denying people the opportunity to enter the US because they are associated with censorship. 

How do we even define someone as a person "who help(s) internet censorship" and is a “builder of the Great Firewall”? Fang Binxing is the architect of China’s extensive censorship network, widely known as the “Father of China’s Great Firewall”. This petition would deny him entry into the US. 

But Fang Binxing is only one person who has become the public face of censorship. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) oversees and implements filtering software. Would anyone associated with the MIIT be banned from coming into the US? 

I spent a summer as a National Science Foundation Fellow doing ethnographic fieldwork at CNNIC in Beijing. The people who oversaw CNNIC relished the chances they had to go to conferences outside of China. Conferences provided CNNIC officials an important source of firsthand information and experience of the world beyond China. The MIIT oversees the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC). Often referred to as the equivalent of the US’ FCC, CNNIC manages administrative affairs such as domain registry and anti-phishing. CNNIC also has a research arm that is similar to the Pew Internet Research Center, producing statistical reports about the Chinese internet that researchers and journalists often cite. 

One of the most important things I learned from my time at CNNIC is that these people whom we call "censors" are much more aware of the world than we in the West often portray them to be. This should inform policy decisions to maintain open exchanges with officials who oversee the Chinese internet. 

This petition would deny all CNNIC researchers and officials the opportunity to come to the US for conferences and events. Such a petition is backwards. We should be encouraging Fang Binxing to come to the US. He should witness what a society with limited censorship looks like and be a part of the discussions about internet freedom at internet governance conferences.

More in AlJazeera.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

China's internet companies are looking increasingly outside their borders and go global. At the China Weekly Hangout Steven Millward of TechinAsia and Fons Tuinstra discussed in November 2012 their global aspirations.
 

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China hacker: between capital and the state - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Prolific hacker "Wicked Rose" has turned himself into a "security professional" after years of using holes in the Microsoft Office to dig into the US Defense department. Sociologist Tricia Wang wonders in 88-bar whether Chinese hackers finding themselves a new kind of career after being discovered.

Tricia Wang:

If Wicked Rose’s Anvisoft is a legitimate company, he would be following an already paved path for hackers with shady pasts. Convicted hackers in the West, such as Kevin Mitnick have become “security professionals.”

But in China, infamous hackers are usually plucked up by the Chinese state for cushy jobs. Could this be a signal that capitalism is competing against the Chinese state for knowledge workers, like Wicked Rose? Or as China continues to prove, the state and the market can always find new ways to operate together.

More in 88-bar.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Not only hackers are expanding their scope, also China's internet companies go global. The China Weekly Hangout discussed on November 15, 2012 with Steven Millward of Tech in Asia those global aspirations.

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Lack of trust hinders creativity - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

After two years of on-the-ground research in China sociologist Tricia Wang is drawing some conclusions on how the lack of trust and creativity interact. Trust with individuals and institutions if key to allow creativity to blossom, she writes  on the website 88-bar. A story about hacker spaces. 

Tricia Wang:

In my work, I show that the lack of trust between individuals and social trust with institutions is hindering creativity. The problem is that institutions can really promote or damper the expression of creativity, and in the case of China, its education system (combined with cultural elements and political control) has hindered, not promoted, creativity among Chinese youth... 

But creativity is not about how much you know, but about how much you can think beyond what you know. 

The reality is that Chinese people are not as creative as they could be, for now. There is nothing inherently uncreative about the Chinese. I mean who really thinks that about Chinese people after spending a day on the streets. Migrants and youth all over are doing mind-blowing stuff. China is dripping with creativity as your research confirms. But we aren’t’ seeing the mind-blowing stuff happening within formal spaces. 

So where are the creatives in China? I don’t think the future crazy ass disruptive innovators are going to come through Tsinghua, this is not to say that there aren’t brilliant freaking people there doing cool stuff.

More at 88-bar, and the stories of some real creative hackers.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Tricia Wang will be speaking in New Zealand in the second week of February 2013. Are you interested in having her as a speaker too? Do get in touch for her availability and conditions.

How would your life in China look like without VPN? That question a lot of people are asking themselves as the internet filter systems gained the ability to shut down their VPN's and China's media kindly point out foreign VPN's are illegal in China anyway. The China Weekly Hangout will focus on Thursday 20 December on this issue.  Read the full announcement here, or register directly here.

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Porn, the thriving force on China's internet - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Most of China's internet users are not looking for politics, but porn. The authorities have tried to ban porn, but sociologist Tricia Wang sees in the country's internet cafe's how porn is driving the business, she reports in Makeshift. The governmental whack-a-mole chase for online illegality. 

Tricia Wang:

Lao Bing is doing what most males at the Internet cafe are doing, have done, or will be doing later on that night—searching for porn. Users across the world are drawn to this corner of the infobahn; some estimate that porn accounts for a full third of Internet bandwidth. 

But finding porn in China isn’t as easy as finding a movie. Like the fleeting urges they inspire in viewers, sites regularly pop up and quickly fade away from the ethereal glow of the screen. The continuing hunt speaks to the drive for openness in its various forms. 

The foreigner’s image of China often includes Communist Party officials using censorship tools to prevent citizens from accessing and spreading political messages. We don’t think of people like Lao Bing, chilling in a room with hundreds of males looking at porn. 

Authorities have capriciously enforced a pornography ban since 1949. But when China connected itself to the World Wide Web in 1994, authorities found themselves with a new challenge: censoring the relentless availability of pornographic websites. 

Over the last 18 years, police stations have staged assemblies warning youth of the dangers of porn and the Internet. Anti-pornography posters with cartoon figures of school boys are in practically every cyber cafe. Announcements of large sting operations closing down tens of thousands of pornography sites at a time are routine. 

A few times a year, the government-controlled media reports large-scale arrests of pornography site administrators. Looming in their collective memory is the 2005 life sentence of Chen Hui, who ran the nation’s largest site. But all the denunciations, moral policing, and incarcerations have not deterred a nation of males (the gender ratio at birth is about 120 males to 100 females) from porn consumption.

More in Makeshift.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Tricia Wang will be speaking in New Zealand in the second week of February 2013. Are you interested in having her as a speaker too? Do get in touch for her availability and conditions.

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Is the human flesh search China's Anonymous? - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Can you compare China's human flesh searchers with Anonymous? Sociologist Tricia Wang discussed for Atlantic the background of China's online warriors, looking for corrupt officials and other injustice. On 88 Bar Tricia's Wang publishes part of the interview that was not yet published.

Tricia Wang (and questions by Jessi Levine):

But flesh searchers write some pretty crazy stuff – why do they do that?  

You have to take the comments with a grain of salt. In many ways it is the same kind of commentary you find on 4chan boards and Youtube videos – these are people who don’t feel like they have an outlet other than the internet. All of us have multiple identities and like us, many flesh searchers exhibit one identity when they are flesh searching and another identity in another space whether it is offline or online. Often these identities are polar opposites of each other. But most importantly, the anonymous nature of HFS permits people to say things that they would never say IRL.

Are there any movements like Chinese Flesh Search? 

We could try to see this as the Chinese version of Anonymous, but structurally it is very different from Anonymous. Anonymous is more organized and has a much more clear agenda. Anonymous’s issues also cross national boundaries whereas Human Flesh Searchers are concerned with uncovering cases inside China.

How does HFS reflect what Chinese society is going through?

Human Flesh Searchers don’t trust the system to adjudicate points of social transgression, so they take it up themselves to do it. HFS  also speaks to the changing moral landscape in China. For example, the cat killer in Hangzhou triggered questions about animal rights and protection. If this happened in the US the witness would’ve contacted the police or animal protection department and they would’ve contacted the relevant department and there would be documentation and follow up. But in a society that has only recently domesticated dogs and cats, the proper institutional oversight for domesticated animals has yet to emerge. So HFS is an ad hoc system that emerges to fulfill an institutional oversight gap.

What does this have to do with trust?

I’m fascinated by HFS because it shows the resilience of Chinese internet users to develop trust under the most difficult of circumstances. HFS exhibits the highest level of online group undertaking, which means that a lot of  trust is required to accomplish a task. And despite censorship and frequently disappearing websites, people are able to accomplish HFS. But at the same time it exhibits the low levels of trust in society – people remain anonymous because they fear the consequences of going public, which I answer in more detail in the next question. A more transparent and accountable China will engender more citizen trust in the government. The intensity of HFS activity could be a proxy barometer for the level of social trust Chinese citizens have in their government. A more open China will not need to rely as much on flesh searchers, whereas a more closed China will rely more on flesh searchers.

Why do flesh searchers remain anonymous?  

There are many different reasons. One of the primary reasons I look at in my work is trust. Many flesh searchers tell me that they don’t reveal their identity online because they fear retribution by the local police, government, or the people they are flesh searching. From their perspective, the risk of being public leaves them too vulnerable. Another reason could be due to pluralistic ignorance, where everyone agrees something is wrong but individuals are scared to speak up because they think they are the only one and group punishment. So instead of speaking up publicly, HFS speak up anonymously

More at 88 Bar.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

The China Weekly Hangout on Thursday will let you ask questions about China. And with some luck, you might actually get an answer. Register here, if you want to participate.

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Five most-read stories for October 2012

Kaiser Kuo

Veterans and newcomers at the China Speakers Bureau come together at this month's list of most-read stories. On the veteran side we see Paul French and Kaiser Kuo. At the side of the - relative - newcomers both Tricia Wang and Wei Gu. 

1. Food scares are not going away - Paul French
2. Going cheap did not help Sinopec - Wei Gu
3. Renminbi, not expected to go global soon - Victor Shih
4. Management lessons from the three kingdoms - Kaiser Kuo
5. Dancing with handcuffs, trust building in China – Tricia Wang

Do you need any of these speakers at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form. 

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Flesh searches, the online quest for justice - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Human flesh searches, online crowd-sourced searches for corrupt officials, animal abusers or otherwise as nasty perceived people have developed into an online prosecution system, to correct a failing  offline justice, explains internet researcher Tricia Wang in the Atlantic.

The Atlantic:

“If you want to understand China right now, you should be paying attention to what its flesh searchers are doing,” [Tricia] Wang said... 

“Flesh searchers feel like they are sharing information in a system that does not have a comprehensive or consistent rule of law,” explained global tech sociologist, ethnographer and 88 bar blogger Tricia Wang in an exclusive Tea Leaf Nation interview. “In a way, this is like an ad hoc, ground-up rule of law. It’s thrown together, it’s not very systematic, it can fall apart at any second—but what’s amazing is that there is no face-to-face contact and yet trust is able to form.” 

Wang specifically cited the infamous and disturbing kitten-killer case. 

In 2006, a video of a woman stomping a kitten to death with the sharp point of her high heel appeared on a Mop forum. With no recourse to file a formal complaint, outraged netizens took matters into their own hands and, through a flesh search, found the culprit: Wang Jiao from Heilongjiang province summarily lost her iron rice bowl (铁饭碗), a coveted government job that usually lasts to retirement and pays a lifetime pension. 

“Not everyone is doing it as a response to some moral compass to the government, or for even a righteousness reason,” said Wang. “We can instead see this as a more broad manifestation of a collective response to a society that’s undergoing some major debates; the issues that people are flesh searching really reveal the things that China is going through.” 

Issues, as revealed with Yang [Dacai] and his watches, often involving government conduct and corruption.

More in the Atlantic.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Building trust on the internet - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Key lesson cultural anthropologist Tricia Wang learned from the internet in China: trust and transparency are essential to succeed. And that lesson is not limited to China, but universal, she teaches at a media conference in Malmo, Sweden, illustrated by NGO 'Free Lunch'.

Even the best systems to measure results do not work, if the people, the customers or others, do not trust those results. Transparency of those results is more important to win over the trust of its users. Tricia Wang uses the measurement of electricity at the end of the nineteenth century to illustrate why the troublesome administration of the 'Free Lunch' project is needed to win trust.

A lesson that might also apply to algorithm-driven technology firms like Google, Klout and Peerindex.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Mapping out a city: the sex workers - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Sociologist Tricia Wang describes on her weblog how she sets up her field work in China. Through good contacts with taxi drivers she explores the basic features of a city: who is paying where and what for sex?

Tricia Wang:

One of the ways I map the city is to quickly figure out where people go to pay for sex and have sex.  In China, the sex worker industry encompasses all economic levels. It's a bit complex to figure out which hotels and karoke bars are for high-end clients to which ones are for every day citizens. 

There are several levels where people pay for sex in most first to second tier Chinese cities:

1. super high end brothel (10,000RMB and up)
2. the mayor's brothel ( based off of conversations I estimate it to be around several thousand RMB)
3. the policeman's brothel ( based off of conversations I estimate it  to be around 200-1000RMB)
4. the business person's (200-1000RMB)
5. the citizen's brothels (5-100RMB)
6. street walkers who charge aound 20-50RMB - client pays for hotel

When the police do sweeps and arrest sex workers, only those who work in what I call the "citizen's brothels" get arrested. Street walkers can be easily arrested anytime and they are the most vulnerable because most of the time they don't work with the protection of an overseer. 

All the other brothels pay off the police or some other department to protect themselves. The police only go to the police-protected brothels and of course the mayor's brothel is only accessible to higher up government officials. The super high end brothels are accessible for anyone who has money. Here are some fieldnotes from one of my earlier attempts to map out sex in Wuhan last year around October.

More in Tricia Wang's weblog.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

More about Tricia Wang, exploring China's underbelly in Storify.

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Online charity: China's drive for trust and transparency - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Free lunch, a Chinese crowd-sourced fund, took off amid charity scandals and public skepticism about giving money. Internet watcher Tricia Wang describes in UKWired how a former journalist free lunches for thousands of malnourished kids by building trust and transparency.

Tricia Wang:

We often think of internet-powered revolutionary change as enacted through a model of forcing political change through civil disobedience, such as the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street. But, here in China, I've been documenting the emergence of a model that uses crowdsourced fundraising, social-media transparency and social pressure to forge a collective action that is apolitical and effective in changing policy from below. It's called Free Lunch. 

On Sina Weibo, China's largest microblog, more than a million Chinese citizens have raised RMB ¥30 million (£3m) to provide free lunches to malnourished children in over 160 rural schools in one year. 

The programme originated with Chinese journalist Deng Fei, who made a name for himself exposing child kidnapping and organ harvesting. When he received a tip from a teacher that schoolchildren in the countryside were too impoverished to eat lunch, he investigated the situation and realised that the problem was nationwide. He quit his job as a journalist and dedicated his time to solving the problem. He started posting pictures of children, accompanied with requests for donations from his estimated 200,000 followers at the time (he now has two million)... 

Free Lunch has proved itself as a model. Seven months after it launched, the government invested ¥16 million in a similar programme. 

Programmes such as Free Lunch are introducing new cultural values and practices to China. They also reveal that crowdsourced fundraising that doesn't track real-time effectiveness may not be suitable for non-Western contexts. 

Free Lunch leverages people's compulsion not just to do good, but to engage in shared responsibility. This kind of innovation builds the foundation for future macro-innovations in transparency. It hacks the system using existing tools, creating viruses of hope that even one person can contribute to social change.

More in UKWired.

What does Google want in China? A public hangout on Thursday 12 July. 

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

More on Tricia Wang, exploring China's economic underbelly at Storify.  

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• Tricia Wang on building trust online

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• Why Google will not win back China - Tricia Wang

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• Top-5 most-read stories June 2012

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• Donations to charity in China down nearly 20% for 2011

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Top-5 most-read stories June 2012

Compared to the exciting times in China in May, June has been more back to basics in terms of news. Or is it a sign summer holidays are nearing? China does not honor the concept of a summer holiday, but traditionally we do see a drop in traffic during the summer, allowing us to have a break too. 

We have started to experiment with the Google+ Hangouts, in different formats, and although we are still fine-tuning the effort, we see the first results also here in our top-5 most-read stories. We will take the summer for some more fine-tuning and hope to organize a weekly show in September. What have been the most-popular stories in June:

1. What can China or the West do in South Sudan? - Howard French
2. The End of Cheap China, Fortune review - Shaun Rein
3. What Chinese Want - Tom Doctoroff
4. What is going wrong in localization - Ben Cavender
5. Why Google will not win back China - Tricia Wang

 

Why Google will not win back China - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Some - including the company itself - are waiting for search giant Google to gain ground over Baidu, the market leader in China. Forget it, says sociologist Tricia Wang in Postnoon. "Google is clueless about the China market."

Postnoon discusses Google's policy of confronting the Chinese government on censorship, for example by introducing their latest gadget, pointing the finger at the censors when results are blocked:

Tricia Wang, a sociologist researching the digital habits of Chinese people, sees this as a sign that Google is trying to be nothing more than a “niche search engine in China.” 

“I don’t see how this actually reaches their goal,” she says. “First it only antagonizes the government more, and thereby could make it even harder for the existing user base to access Google. So it could be counterproductive. Second, it’s targeting people who are already their existing users, so they’re preaching to the preachers. 

Ordinary Chinese users are aware of censorship, she says, but what matters most to them is getting useful results. Google’s new policy does not make that any easier. The only difference is that now, people searching for the Yangtze River on Google will get a warning to change their language or be blocked. On Baidu, people can search directly for the Yangtze because the politically sensitive results have already been weeded out. 

Beyond search results, Wang says that Google simply lacks many features that Chinese users want. In Baidu, users can look up train schedules or play Angry Birds within the browser, while Google offers none of that. 

“I just don’t think that they understand the Chinese market at all,” she says. “They don’t have any features that makes it overwhelmingly useful for China. … This feature that they implemented, it’s a very self congratulatory, pat on the shoulders, ‘hey, we did it’ — and does not actually do anything to widen their user base.”

More in Postnoon.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

More about Tricia Wang and her investigation of China's underbelly in Storify.  

Dancing with handcuffs, trust building in China - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

How come a student from China's country side ends up throwing shoes at the architect of the elaborate internet censorship systems, and gets away with it? Sociologist Tricia Wang told at the Lift conference in Geneva how building trust relationships in China go through a major shift.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Tricia Wang has been doing extensive research in China's economic underbelly. Read more about it in Storify. 

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An outspoken internet generation - Tricia Wang

Tricia Wang

Despite ingenious internet censorship, China's internet users has always been able to circumvent those filters to a certain degree. Sociologist Tricia Wang see even a new group emerging, who is becoming more outspoken, under their own name, write Global Post.

The Global Post:

Ingenious users have continued to evade the censors by devising ever-new ways of referring to verboten subjects. On Wednesday, the phrase “big news” came to stand for the Bo Xilai murder mystery; previously the word “tomato” and “Chongqing hotpot” also served as code for the scandal. 

Even now, the most politically outspoken users are continuing to post actively, even defiantly. Tricia Wang, a sociologist based in central China, explains for some users speaking publicly under their own name has always been part of the appeal. 

"Those people say, 'I don’t like the policy of course, but it doesn’t bother me — I’m still going to use weibo.' It’s not like old China where people are going to disappear. This group of people say, 'Yeah it’s my real name, and yeah, I stand behind my forwards,'" she said.

More in the Global Post.

Tricia Wang is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

More about Tricia Wang, exploring China's underbelly, at Storify.

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