Alternative reality

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One of the more striking end-of-year statistics pumped out recently by the Chinese government was an update on the number of internet users in the country, which had reached 210 miliion. It is a staggering figure, up by more than 50% on the previous year and more than three times the number for India, the emerging Asian giant with which China is most often compared. Within a few months, according to Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, China will have more internet users than America, the current leader. And because the proportion of the population using the internet is so low, at just 16%, rapid growth is likely to continue for some time.

That such a big, increasingly wealthy and technologically adept country has embraced the internet is no surprise, but it has done so in a very different way from other countries. That is in large part the result of the government’s historically repressive approach towards information and entertainment. News is censored, television is controlled by the state, and bookshops and cinemas, shuttered during the Cultural Revolution, are still scarce.

The internet itself is also tightly controlled. Access to many foreign websites (such as Wikipedia) is restricted, and Google’s Chinese site filters its results to exclude politically sensitive material. New rules governing online video came into force recently. Electronic retailing is in its infancy, thanks to an unwieldy government-controlled payment system, so most shopping is still done in person. The attempt by eBay, the world’s leading online auction site, to enter the Chinese market was a flop. Alibaba, a site often described as the eBay of China, is in fact more an electronic yellow pages, helping buyers find sellers, than an online auction room.