Do you speak Chinternese?
Firstly let us be straight about the term "Chinese Netizens.”
Since the introduction of the internet in China in 1994, the size of the Chinese mobile and PC internet population has somewhat blossomed.
At the end of 2008 China had 298 million Netizens, 22.6% of the whole population of the country, according to CNNIC.net. This number went up to 485 million in July, 2011.
So "Chinese Netizens" refers to 485 million people who regularly go online whether it be on a mobile device or PC.
The amount of time spent online has increased to the point that internet addiction is an official clinical disorder with Internet Addiction boot camps around China.
There have even been instances where parents have sold their children to fund playing games at internet cafes.
It is not uncommon these days for Chinese Netizens to band together in their millions and, for example, expose corruption or solve hit and run incidents and then publically humiliate the suspect in a phenomenon called Human Flesh Search (人肉搜索 rén ròu sōu suǒ.)
So it is safe to say the opinion of internet users are reflections on the opinions of the vast majority of Chinese people.
And it’s not surprising that Chinese blog contents are often the topic of conversations between young people at parties, parties where people spend a lot of their time engrossed on their mobile blogging accounts rather than each other. The above picture is not an uncommon site.
Young people feel at ease when they chat online, especially when using the same up to date internet language.
Similar to other groups of people, Chinese netizens also have sought for a way to be unique but recognisable, modern but durable.
Internet language is increasingly composed of new words, terms or phrases. To speak of these words is to show you are trendy and up-to-date, so they are popular with university under and post graduates.
Here are some of the influences on China's evolving online lingo:
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Recent news
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Different Dialects
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Censorship
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Just showed up
Recent News
至于你信不信，反正我信
Whether you believe it or not, I believe it
The Chinese Ministry of Railways spokesman Wáng yǒng píng 王勇平, in a public realtions disaster, said this this at a press conference on 23rd July, 2011 intending to keep the public’s confidence on the actions taken by rescuers after two high-speed trains crashed in Wenzhou resulting in 40 deaths and 192 injuries.
In order to satirize this issue, large numbers of netizens quoted this sentence on their blog status or used it in various humorous or sarcastic contexts.
Below are subtitled video stills from the press conference with Wáng yǒng píng saying the famous phrase “至于你信不信，反正我信了”
T-shirts printed with his phrase “至于你信不信，反正我信了” are sold on Taobao: a quick but innovative response to the often used internet phrase from the commercial market.
范跑跑 Fàn Pǎopǎo
The term stems from a primary school teacher called Fan who bolted from his class during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 instead of helping his pupils. News of this was widely reported and debated online.
As a result, Netizens named him Fàn Pǎopǎo，literately meaning ‘running Fan’ (pictured below) and thereafter the Pǎo pǎo（跑跑）part was used after a person’s name in order to emphasize that person's cowardliness:
Borrowed From Different Dialects:
给力 Gěilì
The word 给力gěilì meaning “awesome”, “cool” or “powerful”
In the last two years this is one of the most widely used words created by Netizens, which are commonly believed to originate from the slang dialect in Fujian province.
However, the term was not so widely spread until a Japanese cartoon “Rìhé 日和” became incredibly popular on social media, including Renren, Sina Weibo and MOP forum then a bit later on even state media.
A video cut from the Japanese cartoon “Rìhé” (日和漫画) with Chinese subtitles.
To the surprise Chinese Netizen’s it first surfaced from the internet in an article in the People’s Daily Newspaper, Rénmín Rìbào (人民日报) seen below; praising Jiangsu for their achievements on building a ‘culturally powerful province.’
The headline:
Jiāng sū gěilì wénhuà qiángshěng:
“Amazing/fabulous Jiangsu, a culturally strong province.”
An example of 给力 gěilì can be seen blow in this extract from popular blog “ChinaSmack.”
The picture is of a woman in Qingdao beach covering up all to avoid sunburn, attracting ridicule from the online public. Underneath are the translated comments of Chinese netizens.
Gěilì can be seen in the first comment that reads literally “sweating, no ordinary awesome” 汗, 不是一般的给力, in this case sarcastically meaning “especially awesome.”
The first character 汗, meaning “sweating,” replaces the symbol 
normally used in online chatting.
From different accents:
有木有 yǒu mù yǒu
Recently, a three character phrase, a slant on the common 有没有 yǒu méi yǒu and approximately meaning “Yes or no??” was born of Chinese Netizens.
It is always placed at the end of either a sentence or a paragraph, but always along with exclamation marks.
As well expressing exclamation the phrase also makes fun of a northern dialect in China.
The popularity of “有木有!!!” used to express anger or depression, also brings to life the “roaring” (咆哮体 páo xiào tǐ) nature of blogging and chatting in China.
”有木有!!!” is used here to Páo xiào tǐ by some girls who failed to pass their maths exams, as a way to unleash their anxiety.
From censorship:
Censorship has had possibly the largest influence on changing online language in China.
Swear words, deleted by censors as they are typed into a live blog or social network site, have been changed by Netizens to different characters with similar sounds to disguise them.
For instance the popular phrase cào nǐ mā (showing the characters for this would risk this article) which translates to a harsh phrase in English, (a curse at your maternal parent) was changed in around 2009 to look like “草泥马” (cǎo ní mǎ) in order to avoid the censors.
It sounds almost the same but uses these characters:
Chinese netizens use the new草泥马 cǎo ní mǎ regularly in conversations now. Somehow the last character马mǎ (horse) became associated with the Alpaca, a South American camelid:
Now the animal, largely unknown in China previously, is a theme for stuffed toys and t-shirts sold in markets with the slogan "草泥马” cǎo ní mǎ printed on the front:
Recently, the term cǎo ní mǎ surprisingly emerged on “非诚勿扰” Fei Cheng Wu Rao, one of the most popular TV-dating shows in mainland China from JSTV.
After being asked about the name of his pet Alpaca, (can't remember how many lights turned red from the ladies on that one) a male guest answered directly with 草泥马” Cǎo Ní Mǎ (shown below in the video stills), astonishing the audiences both on and offline as it’s not a particularly polite term.
From this case, especially with stuffed toys for sale displaying the insult we can boldly predict that the internet language will have an increasing influence and power in the society, especially in mass media.
Just showed up:
伤不起 Shāng Bù Qǐ
Meaning “things cannot get any worse” or “I cannot be hurt anymore,” no one can really tell where exactly 伤不起 shāng bù qǐ originated from but the phrase didn’t exist before 2011.
The term is usually placed alongside “有木有” as a way to express disappointment and to complain about a current situation.
In the above example blog status, a stressed out girl laments about drinking water containers weighing 20kg are too heavy for her to lift.
She finishes by saying “伤不起!!!” A soft complaint suffix, as if to say “This is not happening!”
坑爹 Kēng Diē
The Chinese version of the Japanese cartoon “Rìhé” (日和漫画) also boosted another term’s popularity in 2010:
Currently it means “got trapped or conned”. Netizens started using it to describe those untrustworthy ambitions, circumstances or people.
Below is a still from another chapter of “Rìhé” with “坑爹 kēng diē” in the subtitle.
Below is a screen grab of a blogger using 坑爹 kēng diē to grumble about the point of learning maths.
Spot another phrase mentioned earlier in this article also used by this blogger.
囧 jiǒng
An ancient word from around 476 BC, Zhan Guo Dynasty and has not been used for many centuries but in around 2008 came back onto fashion all round China.
The character's unique face-like features started appearing in social media, forums and instant messaging because it enabled people to express their embarrassment in quite a novel way.
The character originally meant “patterned window” or simply “brightness,” but now rarely means that. Instead it now shares the same meaning as a similar sounding character 窘 jiǒng, meaning “embarrassment” or “depression.”
It is possible to predict that 囧 will be put in the modern dictionary again as it is a real Chinese character.
Its wide use has led to clothing brands adopting the image.
So what?
Whereas trendy words in English tend to come and go, in Chinese they linger and grow in popularity as they are embraced.
If the language changes too much then could this lead to intimidated authorities banning internet cafes? See this fascinating field study into the social significance of Chinese internet cafes.
An interesting result of the spread of this internet language is the younger generation of Cantonese and Mandarin speakers joined by a common digital dialect.
As it is fashionable for young Chinese people to show they are up to date on all the latest internet lingo, so the popularity of internet language is not just for every day enjoyment. The different languages and cultures in China care being bridged by this constantly spreading online vocabulary, especially between Mandarin and Cantonese speaking areas.
Nowadays, speaking some Mandarin-originated internet terms or words is very welcome among young Cantonese speakers, something not commonly seen in the past.
Internet lingo pouring out into everyday conversations confirms that societal changes in China are starting from the bottom and that the internet is becoming more and more influential.
Smart phones: The only way forward
A person’s mobile phone in China is a reflection of prestige, a mark of stature as it's produced from a pocket or hand bag in buses, trains and elevators. Status can’t necessarily be represented by clothes and accessories which are easily copied. Expensive cars are another way to show it all off but the comfort of plush interiors doesn’t compensate for the inconvenience of nightmarish congestion so the car is often left at home. This leaves the phone. A status symbol carried everywhere, often produced in every super market que, subway train and elevator. There can be a lot of waiting around in China so even more opportunity to get the phone out to pass the time.
Shanzhai phones, the infamous multibillion dollar brand knock offs, have accumulated vast wealth by producing exact aesthetic copies of well know mobile brands, renamed them “Nckia” and “Blockberry” and sold them to China's low end users. They look like the original brand but the simple phones are adapted to appeal to Chinese consumers such as bright, glitzy, accentuated exteriors coupled with actual useful functions like phone lights, key in areas where electricity is temperamental. They were so successful that their business model has been dissected by foreign companies in order to gain knowledge of competing in China, and their phones, sold in the Middle East, ironically could have helped to bring down some Governments during the Arab Spring. But with sales predicted to peak in 2011 this era could be coming to a stand still. Government restrictions are tightening, entry level smart phones are becoming cheaper and China’s middle class are getting wealthier according to research firm IHS iSuppli. Android phones are falling in price and with the imminent arrival of the iPhone 5 to be offered by China Unicom and China Mobile it means that more and more consumers no longer need to make do with reduced functionality.
An example of smart phone dominance can be observed with the current Nokia debacle. Nokia who were dominating the Chinese market with their affordable, double sim card phones, now have an inventory build up of around 5 million handsets piling up in re seller's shops around China. The company's old Symbian operating system is weighing the them down as is their image. Chinese consumers now spend more time posting on Weibos and playing Angry Birds (which has grown past 100 million monthly active users, and it has done so faster than any other technology brand in history according to Rovioone) than sleeping. Entry level smart phones are now cheaper than Nokia’s low end Symbian handsets and have far more to play with. And in case you are a budding app developer, recently China mobile offered 100,000RMB ($15,500) to anyone who produced a mobile phone game that they would release.
In contrast, Nokia phones are now deterring Chinese buyers in a not too different fashion to the prole drift that hurt Burberry in UK in the 1990s, where what was marketed at the upper tier became widely associated with lower tier. A similar context is now prevalent in China with Nokia phones being associated with waiters and bus divers leading more and more Chinese to save up for Apples and Androids even though they cost thirty percent more in China than in US.
International Women’s Day 2011
March 8th, 2011 will be the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day! It's a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women’s past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, IWD is a national holiday.
But why, you may ask, is there a need for an international day for women in the first place?
Although the progress in protecting and promoting women’s rights has moved in leaps and bounds over the past several years, the fact remains that there is nowhere in the world where women have the same rights and opportunities as men. The worldwide figure of 1.3 billion people in absolute poverty, majority are women, and that, on average, women earn 30 to 40 percent less than men for the same type and amount of work. Moreover, women continue to be the primary victims of rape and domestic violence all around the world.
Celebrated annually on March 8, International Women's Day is an opportunity to inspire women to achieve their fullest potential, raise awareness about critical women's issues and unite and mobilize for meaningful change on the other hand. Countries around the world hold events to celebrate this festival every year. The following are the number of celebrations this year.
The celebration in Beijing in 2010
The mission in Beijing was to raise awareness about the daily challenges that women and girls face living in China. On Friday, March 12th 2010, at Yishu 8 art gallery, they hosted a cocktail benefit comprised of a silent auction, keynote speakers, networking and women-to-women mentorship opportunities. The year's event benefited the China Education Initiative and aimed at fostering a dialogue about education inequality in China and supporting the empowerment of young women in academics.
They hoped to raise at least 100,000rmb to fund two women Teaching Fellows for the China Education Initiative (CEI) to serve as teachers in rural Yunnan public schools and develop after-school mentorship activities for girls. With IWD's support, they not only had an opportunity to become teachers but also promote one of the most important elements of success for young girls: mentorship.
Now, how are you going to be celebrating International Women’s Day this year? All around the world, men and women honor their mothers, friends, significant others, and colleagues with small gifts or flowers. OK, plan it now!
The Battle of China’s Micro Blogging Market
With Twitter being blocked from Mainland China in 2009, there have been a number of similar services arising in the Chinese micro blogging market. However, there are two micro blog sites that have distinguished themselves from the masses of Twitter replicas – Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo.
Sina Weibo was launched in August 2009, and has seen a rapid growth of their user base. Sina Weibo CEO, Charles Chao, recently said that he predicted to have 150 million users under their Weibo service within the end of 2011.
As of February 2011, Tencent Weibo is the micro blogging leader in China. With currently more than 100 million users, Tencent is reigning at the top. However, where Tencent has the greatest user base, Sina’s users are more active than their counterpart and they are also growing at high rate. According to the Chinese sharing tool JiaThis’ December 2010 statistics, Sina users shared 6 times the amount of links that the users at Tencent did.
Earlier this week, Sina Weibo launched two new services: 1) Voicemail Weibo, where users can dial a service number to record a voice message, which will be uploaded and shared on their respective Weibo accounts; and 2) Direct Video Upload, a service that give users the freedom of uploading up to 200mb videos to their posts. It is worth noting that Sina also went into collaboration with China’s number 1 video site, Youku, in November 2009, making it even easier for their users to embed video.
On top of the newly launched functions, Sina Weibo already offers their users threaded comments, social groups, and photo sharing, making Sina Weibo, for many a more attractive choice over the more traditional (and slightly more Twitter-like) Tencent Weibo.
Sina’s offensive against Tencent Weibo does not show any signs of slowing down. In November 2010, Sina CEO Charles Chao announced a fund for their Weibo developers worth RMB 200 million, which makes it very likely that innovative functions will keep on coming.
The combination of a growing number of peers to connect to, along with numerous innovative functions, put Sina Weibo in a highly inviting spotlight to China’s 420 million Internet users, which is something that should be of distinct interest to relevant social media marketers.
As Sina’s innovation continues, it will definitely be interesting to see how Tencent will counteract. Considering that Tencent holds about 640 million active users on their QQ Messenger service, they have a massive potential user group that somehow can be induced into using Tencent Weibo. As a substantial number of Sina Weibo’s users have a QQ account, it goes without saying that Tencent has a favorable upper hand seeing that they have the chance offer two highly regarded services in one – Tencent Weibo meets Tencent QQ.
In order to win users from the one or the other micro blogger communities in China, it is suggested that a likely first step is to reach out to Chinese celebrities. Global news agency Reuters has observed an interesting trend amongst the Chinese micro bloggers. Reuters states that the micro bloggers not only use the sites to express their personal thoughts and opinions, but also to a great extent to follow their favorite celebrities’ everyday life.
Studies have shown that there is a high degree of celebrity addiction in today’s community and that celebrities’ impact on fans’ followers’ behavior, even if it means switching Weibos. If Tencent and Sina can convince celebrities, relevant to their respective users, to exercise their micro blogging one of the sites, it is certain that significant crowds will follow.
As of now, it is uncertain what road Tencent and Sina’s Weibos will take. Will they in the future still be fierce competitors? Or will they go separate ways and offer China’s vast number of Internet users two differentiating products? As always, time will tell.
Licensed media entertainment content makes its way into China
In the past year, two of China’s big players in the digital media market, Youku and Baidu, have moved into offering licensed and/or pay-per-view content to its users. With few physical distribution options available in the Chinese market, offering online entertainment content, with the consent from U.S. media producers and the Chinese government, opens a new and exciting distribution channel of U.S. media content in China.
Youku, which offers its users to upload videos without any time limits, has since their earlier days seen pirated TV shows and movies being uploaded to their servers. In order to better their reputation amongst advertisers, both in China and worldwide, Youku announced their new and improved fingerprinting technology, a technology that scans through all uploaded material in their video library, and automatically delete content that are subject to copyright infringements. With implementing this technology in January 2010, Youku saw a decrease in abroad copyright infringement lawsuits and a reputation that made its way up the ladder.
Last month, Youku made a second major strike against pirated material on its website. Teaming up with U.S. media giant Warner Bros., Youku are now offering top quality U.S. movies and TV shows for a price which is next to nothing. As a result of the recent partnership, users of Youku.com can today stream content, such as the recent worldwide blockbuster “Inception”, in high resolution for only RMB 5 and older library selections
for RMB 3.
Early in 2010, the Chinese search engine Baidu joined forces with U.S. private-equity firm Providence Equity Partners LLC to create Qiyi.com, a advertisement-supported website where users can view licensed media content, very similar to the U.S. service Hulu.com. Qiyi’s CEO, Gong Yu, states that “the site will spend over RMB 200 million toward content procurement”, which means that Qiyi’s users will most likely have plenty of high quality content to choose from.
The online video market saw a 95 per cent increase in its total revenues from 2008 to 2009, so it is safe to say that offering licensed online media content to a dynamic market segment, such as China’s Y and Z generations, is likely to be a recipe for success.
But how to market the fast moving generations of Y’s and Z’s effectively can be a fairly difficult challenge. As there are several websites that offer the same amount of media content as Youku and Qiyi for free and without advertisements, even though it is pirated, the majority of users tend to move towards the cheaper option. The current and future licensed media content sites would therefore need to find a way to motivate their users to use their media services over the less legal ones. Could offering a reasonable priced subscription service on their media content be an attractive solution?
DeNA to Enter the Chinese Mobile Gaming Market
A leading mobile phone gaming company, DeNA, a Japanese firm, has made plans to enter the Chinese mobile gaming market in late February. CEO Wang Yong and the CEO of previous tx.com.cn also announced DeNA's acquisition of tx.com.cn in August 2009 and the reason for renaming DeNA to DeNA China Network Technology Company. This Chinese branch of DeNA will be responsible for the implementation and operation of a new gaming application software platform which will be delivered in China.
The new platform will allow Chinese game developers to put their products on DeNA’s platform where consumers can purchase and download the games from all around the world. They have also already secured agreements with around 20 to 30 game developers to produce content for the platform. The agreement between the company and the developers gives developers 70% of the payment from consumers while DeNA is set to receive 30%.
DeNA is the largest mobile phone gaming application platform in Japan with over 20 million registered users and more than 200 third party games. The platform is one of the company’s major business sections and they released a report last August detailing the company's increase in operating revenues by 175% and operating profits by 282%, so are expecting similar success from the Chinese market. With statistics outlying Chinese Internet users obsession with gaming, with almost twice as much Internet use for gaming compared to the US, DeNA's plans seem entirely reasonable.
China Mode 001
ChinaMode001, is an open competition for China's online community to vote on today’s current web innovations and services. Voters can nominate winners in a variety of categories, such as innovation in consumer applications, entertainment, work management, mobile applications, user communities and the most innovative company of the year. The competition was set up by a number of technology insiders themselves to encourage start up businesses to focus on creating innovative applications to facilitate entrepreneurial values in the ever-changing and competitive, complex industry.
The competition has a series of stages, with an audition round where the general public can nominate a candidate in each section. After votes from China's web community come in, a panel of experts selects the finalists for the second round of public voting. This year experts include a number of top business people, journalists, academics and bloggers from various industries like venture capital, advertising and research and development. The second round of voting began on the 13th of December and lasts for two weeks until the 27th. Winners are then announced on January 24th so it’s time to get voting now. Several seminars will also take place to discuss several important issues in digital space from social gaming, social media and new technologies and trends.
The competition is a great way to get a feel for Chinese internet user’s preferences, what is currently popular and who are the people businesses and internet users need to pay attention too and look out for. It is also a great way for businesses to identify news ways to connect with users and discover new media channels that can be used to engage with customers. It also provides a good reflection of what is currently working in the industry, what isn’t and what direction the industry is heading in. The section on foreign applications also gives a good indicator on what external services appeal to the Chinese market and what the Chinese web is missing out on.
ChinaMode001 is excellent ways to showcase the talent of China's online environment as well explore the industry further. Check out the list of companies up for nomination here, and don’t forget to vote.
Zeebo and China Digital
Zeebo Information Technology Co, an independent business institute set up by Zeebo Inc has recently signed an agreement with China Digital to create a digital information and entertainment system targeted towards Chinese consumers. Education and entertainment applications can be delivered easily to customer through Zeebo’ rapid 3G wireless connectivity. Many consumers in China are unable to buy video games as they are too expensive, so Zeebo has chosen to focus on targeting Chinas middle class consumer.
The company which was established from Zeebo Inc, a San Diego based firm, as an individual business entity in Shanghai has grown very rapidly in the digital television market and has recently increased in market share. Zeebo has developed a wireless platform to deliver digital content and services to China, and other emerging global markets. Under the agreement with China Digital the two companies will jointly deliver integrated a digital education, internet and entertainment platform supporting 3G wireless access for China’s cable television customers. The platform will enable Chinese consumer to connect their Zeebo equipped televisions to the internet, to download interactive learning applications and other media content, free from the risk of piracy. Consumers can then subscribe to other content or download directly to their Zeebo from the internet.
At the unveiling of the product last month Zeebo China demonstrated ‘the Zeebo’, the 3G connected terminal devices, working for existing cable TV customers. The Zeebo provides a number of wireless services, including affordable internet connectivity, downloading of localized applications, communications, games and even social networking. Zeebo has been very successful in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Russia and India by bringing "the fun and excitement of interactive entertainment and education to those who—until now—have had little or no access to such technology.”
Treatment for Internet Addiction
Violence, electric shock therapy, medication, incarceration - all these sound more like treatments one would prescribe for a psychopathic serial sex offender rather than for a simple diagnosis of Internet addiction. But all these are supposedly true as Internet addiction treatments and therapies have become a billion-yuan industry in China. All this while it has been unregulated and as we might believe, such unorthodox methods probably claimed more lives than they were trying to save.
Here is a story of a mother and child "escaping" from a treatment centre. What do you think? And make sure you give it some thought - speaking without thinking would earn you a 50-volt dosage, unearthed.
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