I played Frogger first time I ever used a computer. It was on my family’s by-then-already-obsolete Commodore 64. It was blocky, brown and came with floppy discs. Not the small hard square ones, the big thin ones that actually flopped.

Photo: gruntzooki

Unfortunately for the Chinese, by the time most people in China were having their first experiences with computer technology, the PC had left that awkward retro stage and looked more like the mature desktops we see today, with a mouse, colored screen and Microsoft Windows. No DOS for them. But their first experiences were still all the more memorable.

One of my Chinese friends said she was mystified by the mouse when she saw her first computer at the age of 17. She left the countryside to visit her friend who lived in the city. She doesn’t speak the best English, so she expressed it to me by putting her head down, wiggling her hand, and making a zipping sound, pantomiming someone using a mouse. “The arrow could go anywhere,” she said, “I can open a page, and click, close the page. Whoa!”

The average Chinese person went from being mystified by a dancing arrow to using the computer for almost everything. And why wouldn’t they? A portable laptop is perfect for the young, office job generation. These are people between the ages of 18-35, many of them without a family and living in cramped dorms or apartments. Having one small, portable machine that fits on your lap is a better option than carrying around a CD player, DVD player, speakers, television and telephone. Oh and wait, a bookcase. That’s right, the internet reading rate in China climbed quickly to 36.5 % in 2008, surpassing for the first time the 34.7% of reading that was done with books.

It’s not just reading. Thanks to Chinese websites offering free (if not always legal) content, you can download books, movies, music, pretty much anything digital. You can even legally download music using Google. In America, Google may be the king, but in China it’s lagging behind Baidu and is offering loads of free music on Google.cn in an attempt to attract more Chinese users.

One of the most exciting parts of internet life in China is forum web sites. These are massive news, blogging and discussion web sites where citizens, excuse me, “netizens” can read about things happening from an independent source. (I honestly can’t think of an English language counterpart, I’ve never seen websites so massive.)

Among the leading sites is Tianya. “It’s a famous site that has things happening in society, and people can talk about it together,” says my interpreter, “Many people trust this site more than the newspaper.” This sentiment matches Gallup’s finding that over 70 percent of Chinese internet users get their news almost exclusively from the internet.

My interpreter says that these sites can even bring about change: big or small, important or irrelevant. She told a story about how one woman posted on a forum site about how she thought her husband was cheating on her with one of his coworkers, and included photos. Once word got out about the post, the two secret lovers lost their jobs.

On another web site, www.703804.com, people can outright criticize local officials or government employees. It has supposedly been a very useful tool in demanding efficiency from local government. These web sites are important to an educated population frustrated with the censorship found in the mainstream media. Almost everyone I talked to said they went to Tianya every day to read the news.

Of course, who could forget the importance of social networking on the internet in China? According to The Business Insider, Chinese users use the internet a lot more than Americans for things like instant messaging, forums, blogging and gaming. (Makes sense, China is the land of guanxi, social networks are an important part of Chinese culture.) And a very high percentage of internet users spend lots of time on social networking sites, which in China are more than just “social networking.”

Take QQ, the largest social networking site in the world, with over 300 million active members, and 800 million registered users total. (It’s the web site with that damn penguin you see everywhere.) Facebook was only recently able to reach its 300 millionth user mark, at which point they finally became cash-flow positive.

You’ve probably seen your coworkers on Qzone, the blog component of QQ, changing their personalized avatar and updating their blogs. Services like Qzone not only make social networking addicting, it also makes it profitable. QQ generated a billion dollars in revenue in 2008. No other social networking site in the world could claim such success. The runner-runner up was MySpace, with around 800 million.

Right now, with China’s netizen population at 338 million and growing, the internet plays a major role in nearly everything. While the mainstream media remains state-owned and controlled, the forums and blogs have seen an explosion of citizen journalism. The attendant intellectual property issues have become a hot topic in the WTO. China has become the first country to set up internet addiction rehab camps to combat the growing number of teens unable to unglue themselves from the computer. As China’s economy improves and the internet becomes faster and even more accessible these issues will only become more pronounced.

Oh and by the way, if you’re interested in setting up your own Qzone blog, they offer an English version.
 

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