American Social Networks Trudging Into China With Difficulty

Facebook's effort to expand into the largest Internet market might be thwarted facing strict Chinese online police and local competitors.

Murdoch's MySpace, launched in China early 2007, has so far proven to be barely a success, with less than 10 million users at the last count, comparing with the Chinese rivals at 100 million users.

Xiaonei.com (On Campus), a Chinese social networking website, has in last year raised $430 million, which surpassed the capital that Facebook has. David Chao, a venture capitalist who was on the board two years ago when they were looking to fund Xiaonei, said he didn't think western sites are able to compete any time soon. He told Matt Marshal that: "history tells us there’s not going to be too much to worry about an outside, non-Chinese born company taking a big chunk of the Chinese market."

Despite the adroitness western social networks might have in screening porn and violence, the China challenge surfaced when it comes to figure out how to deal with the politically sensitive content. Without a good understanding of Chinese culture, western owners, despite the attractive applications and features, lost the edge to their Chinese counterparts.

Chinese websites, on the other hand, have grown to adapt to the gate-keeping role and have developed the world's most sophisticated Internet censoring system. Growing number of private websites not only filter thousands of "forbidden phrases" every second, but the database has been ever expanding. Some sites hire hundreds of employees to manually go through pages and press the "delete" button. Conventionally, extra attention ought to be given before and during NPC/CPPCC (National People's Congress/The Chinese People Political Consultative Conference) each March when most protests and petitions take place.

As Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN China correspondent, media expert and analyst of China online censorship, wrote in the Wall Street Journal blog recently that China's new subtle approach towards Internet censorship is not good news for western social networking sites as well.

"The strategy seems clear: Give China’s professional journalists a longer leash to cover breaking news even if it’s not positive — since the news will come out anyway and unlike bloggers, the journalists are still on a leash. At the same time, clamp down on blogs, chat rooms and video-sharing sites that might allow too much unfettered discussion of the news."

Although China's tempting number of Internet users, 298 million at the end of 2008, keep luring western big names like Facebooks and MySpace, this cake is not ready to be shared yet.