China Online
Check out this short piece on China’s exploding online population. With 137 million, they’re second only to the United States and they’re growing fast. Turns out there’s a lot of Chinese people over there! It seems obvious with all the reports of gold farming and that new online currency that they aren’t sure what to do with.
I think the article’s pretty interesting. They cite the obvious theme that as more and more Chinese get online, they’re getting access to a lot more information and ways to communicate. The government’s been trying to crack down and censor but where there is a will, on the interwebs, there is generally a way. There many good ways to remain anonymous on the web and to skirt goverment internet blocks.
But what I thought was really insightful about the piece was this point:
And because the Chinese share a single written language, despite the multiplicity of spoken tongues, it could have a unifying effect on the country’s widely dispersed citizenry.
That’s really interesting. I mean, there’s tons of dialects and while Mandarin is theoretically the one, in practice it isn’t. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
July 12th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
I’m curious to know where most of the users are concentrated? I would suspect the larger cities. China really needs to get out into the rural areas, but at the same time not just go out there to bulldoze and pollute in the name of “economic prosperity.”
July 12th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Too true, I suspect it’s mostly along the coast. I imagine, though, as it gets more prominent it will naturally start to trickle out west… although, maybe that’s just the optimist in me.
July 12th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
i dont care for chinamen.