The Internet Culture in China

Things are a little different in China, but you probably already knew that. What you might not have known, is just how different it is. If you have played online games, have used online chat rooms and online gambling sites then you might have bumped into a number of people from China, but they tend to use different sites and different platforms to the rest of the world. As a result, they also have different trends, different internet celebrities and more, as we shall see in this article.

Popular Websites in China

The Chinese have their own versions of many popular websites, including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, the biggest sites of the internet age. YouKu is the Chinese version of YouTube, which is where many of the biggest video bloggers do business and where the youth of the country find the fads to obsess about. YouKu is ranked as one of the most visited websites in the world, 79th in total for traffic, but it is the 6th most popular in China.

Perhaps the most popular website in China is Baidu which, rather fittingly, is a Chinese version of Google, which is one of the most popular websites in the world. This is the top search engine in China and the starting point for most internet activity. Baidu is not just used in China and is also popular in other Eastern countries. It even has a following in the United States.

Sina and Sohu are also very popular in China. These are information websites, much like Wikipedia. QQ is the most popular social media website in the country and is the closest you will find to FaceBook, where sites like Tianya and 163 also attract a great deal of visitors.

Internet Celebrities

As well as their own websites, China also has their own internet celebrities, as expected. One of the main ones is Guo Mei Mei, a blogger who exemplifies the rich and luxurious lifestyle, which acts as aspirational entertainment for many Chinese internet users. She has millions of dedicated followers and although already rich, is able to generate a big income from her internet activities.

China also have their own memes and one of these memes, Qian Zhijun, became rather famous. The meme was not very flattering, translating to “Little Fatty”, but he has made a lot of money from it, appearing on television, in film and on adverts. There are countless other internet celebrities out there as well, from those who have made it on social media, to those who release regular videos. China very much emulates the Western world in this sense, almost exactly.

Language

Many non-English speaking countries, most specifically those with different alphabets, have used English letters and other symbols in order to create their own online language. The Greeks did this and refereed to it as Greeklish, and the Chinese have also done it. They use the Roman letters and symbols that closely resemble the Chinese ones, putting together seemingly nonsensical letters and symbols which, when read, sound like a Chinese word.