Western cyberspace copies Chinese parallel internet | Trends


Whoever lands in China without having been informed enough before can be immersed in a great cybernetic nightmare: the messages of Whatsapp they are not sent, social networks do not work, Google Maps do not load, and the same goes for their search engine and email service. The smartphone it has stopped being intelligent to become a brick that only serves to make calls and send SMS. Welcome to 90

Those who have taken the precaution of installing a VPN application to circumvent the censorship that blocks most of the online services from abroad will be able to solve the previous problems, at least from time to time, but they will not stop feeling excluded from Chinese cyberspace. Because they will be unable to pay with their mobile phone, to ask for a taxi -pair one in the traditional way is increasingly difficult-, or to communicate with the Chinese people they know through instant messaging services.

China has built a parallel Internet, and the integration with the one that governs the rest of the world is minimal. WhatsApp and Facebook are WeChat, Google Maps is Baidu Maps - and the same goes for the search engine-, Uber is Didi, YouTube is Youku, and so on and so on. Install those applications is essential to lean out the Chinese network, but there are others that are difficult to access for those who do not reside in the country, as is the case of payment systems by QR code Alipay and Tenpay or services that require a deposit, such as shared bicycles.

On many occasions, something reasonable from the perspective ofl Chinese Big Brother, provide an official identity document and a Chinese bank account is essential to use the service. In other cases, the apps are entirely in Chinese or, at most, have a rudimentary version in English, which is often only partially translated.

This situation may lead one to think that Chinese companies merely copy their foreign counterparts to offer similar services in a gigantic market that protects them from foreign competition with the Great Cybernetic Wall that the Communist Party has erected. And, without a doubt, it was like that at the beginning. But, now, the tortilla has turned around: Chinese applications outperform foreign ones and begin to spread throughout the world.

Good example of the first is the pioneering development of what is known as superapps, mobile applications that combine a multitude of third-party services -miniprograms- without requiring the installation of your particular apps. So, one can order a taxi through Didi from the superapp WeChat or ride an Ofo bike using Alipay's. Y example of the global expansion is TikTok -Douyin in Chinese-, which has become the first international success of China and sweeps across the planet. Facebook is running out of time, because TikTok is taking over Vietnam, it reads in a headline that a couple of years ago would have been inconceivable.

Although they are still little known outside their borders, the 'online' world of the Asian giant is populated by a growing herd of unicorns: Alibaba, Bytedance, Meituan-Dianping, NetEase, Pinduoduo ... They all surpass the 20,000 million dollars of stock market value, and the three that lead the ranking have already left behind the 100,000 million mark. If the forecasts are met, two giants will shake the parks this year with their IPO: Bytedance -matrix of TikTok- is valued at 76,000 million dollars and Kuaishou -also a service of short videos- in 25,000 million.

As the China Internet Report 2019, recently published by the South China Morning Post (SCMP) and its technological subsidiary Abacus, much of the strength of Chinese companies lies in the size of the local market, which totals 829 million Internet users, of which 817 million are connected through mobile devices and 583 million pay with their smartphones.




Citizens of China use their cell phones while waiting for the train at the Tianjin station.

That force is also felt on the outside. Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent invested last year in 42 foreign companies, and everything indicates that this year the trend will continue to rise. "It is a situation that is in line with the 'Internet Plus' plan of the Chinese government, which wants to digitize all aspects of life and gain greater relevance on the Internet worldwide," says Matthew Brennan, one of the leading analysts of cyberspace. Chinese. It also signals a particularly relevant change: China has gone from copying to being copied. "It is the one that now creates trends that later reach the West," he says.

Chua Kong Ho, Technology Editor of SCMP, agrees. "Technology companies around the world are taking note of the digital innovations and new business models that are emerging in China and that are propitiating the fourth industrial revolution," he said during the presentation of a report that gives as an example the 'superapps' 'already the integration of social networks and electronic commerce, known as Social +. Global services such as Facebook, Line, or the Indonesian Go-Jek have signed up for the 'all in one' that WeChat and Alipay first popularized in China.

The report of the newspaper of Hong Kong adds that platforms like Instagram or Amazon also follow the path that have marked giants of e-commerce as Taobao, which has added a social network with short videos and plenty of comments to promote their products. And he stresses that Western companies have already begun to copy Chinese services as brazenly as the Chinese people themselves once used. For sample, a button: the new Lens Challenge of Snapchat is a copy of TikTok.

Will China end up taking the lead? The SCMP report considers that it has some important elements in its favor: it leads the new 5G era, enjoys financing in abundance, uses artificial intelligence systems on a massive scale, and has a citizenship eager for technological innovations. In addition, unlike what happens in the United States or Europe, it is still far from reaching its ceiling, because Internet penetration in China is still only 60%. In third and fourth category cities live 128 million Internet users who have never bought anything online.

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