Items Tagged With China Internet

Adam Schokora, gave the growing China Twitterati community a mention on the Edelman Digital blog today.

Adam Schokora hosts DanweiTV's "The Shanghai Beat" which he produces together with Ginger Xiang. In his other spare time he helps grease the wheels of capitalism in the PRC as a digital and social media strategist for Edelman.

Now based in Shanghai full time, Adam is originally from Detroit and has been in China since 1999. He is curious about technology, youth culture, music, design, fashion, and motorcycle's; not to mention his passion for Chinese language and the Internet. Adam graduated with highest distinction from the University of Michigan with degrees in Chinese politics and Mandarin.

You can follow Adam on Twitter as: ajschokora

Adam recently sat down for a very insightful video interview by me for The China Business Network which I've included below:

Just wanted to say a big CONGRATULATIONS to Tudou co-founder and investor Marc van der Chijs and the entire Tudou.com team on hearing the news of their new round of financing!

I *really* like this company on a number of levels. In addition to being a great success story about a home grown Chinese startup beating out the big international players in the China market, I got great vibes about the management. Although they're considered a local Chinese company, their management is really a great balance of international thinking with local Chinese know-how. Very down to earth considering they're the #1 video sharing site in China.

Was really honored to have the chance of interviewing Marc while in Shanghai in March as well as having a nice lunch chatting further about his China background. To put it blunty, Marc isn't one of those foreigners in China bitching and whining about the grey areas of operating in China. He and the companies he's involved with just do it. He's always come across on his tweets and in person as one of those foreigners in China who understands the importance of taking China in stride with a long term view.

Simply stated, if you let China get to you. You'll never get China. Marc gets China.

Watch, see for yourself. Here's my recent interview with him:

Also, thanks to Marc's introduction, I had the chance to tour Tudou's Shanghai office and having a chat with Tracy Deng, Tudou's VP of Marketing last month. Here's an intro to Tudou:

The Difference Between Foreign vs Homegrown Chinese Startups

So before everyone starts freaking out over drive by media coverage of the new regulations in China affecting video sharing sites, I thought I'd get my friend and CEO of CultureFish Media, Lonnie Hodge to weigh in on what he thinks the new regulations likely mean. In his own words:

It feels a bit like everyone is crying "wolf" or "totalitarian"a bit early.
The government has not said anything specifically about Youtube yet. In the case of Skype a few years ago China openly threatened to restrict access because they perceived Skype as a threat to China Telecom. But in the end, when CTC's stock kept blowing through the roof, the saber-rattles ceased. I use Skype daily.

The Chinese video share sites are not pulling in a lot of revenue and costs are high, so part of this new mandate may be in part protectionist.
Christine is right: this does not differ from controls already in place for websites, individuals and portals. China is choosing to regulate the Internet in much the same way the FCC controls TV and radio in America.

I think it is too soon to get hysterical. And my guess is the average Chinese netizen is going to prefer Chinese content--censored or not--over lots of Youtube offerings. And as stated above: any savvy user here knows how to bypass the controls. Also, Youtube loads terribly slow here on this developing system of relays and bandwidth, so a lot of Chinese just avoid Youtube anyway. I no longer assign Youtube videos to my students to watch because the school servers are just to slow to make it a reasonable request.

Google videos have been blocked here for as long as I can remember. How will this be any different?

I also think the comments that have been left regarding this on the TechCrunch article are quite interesting for getting other people's thoughts and concerns.

My own personal take on it is there too. Basically, I spent 5 years in China working for a foreign company involved in both retail and broadcast television - 2 industries that were hands off to foreign companies on the books. Key word, on the books. The government needs to put something regarding online video sharing on the books. As Lonnie mentioned, no different from the FCC in the U.S. and its regulations right? I don't think these regulations are going to be detrimental to the online video sharing sites as regardless of people's personal issues on the matter, companies operating in China already practice their own form of self censorship anyways.

For more insight you can also refer to a few good blogs who's weighed in on this issue as well:

China Media Project

Danwei.org

Ogilvy Digital Watch

TechBlog86

Little Red Blog

It's 12:40am and just wanted to jot down a very interesting and ongoing flurry of "tweets" -- @kaiserkuo's favorite word -- regarding whether or not CNN is blocked in China. This is a summary of how the stream went down:

• Ken from Shanghaiist couldn't access CNN and informed Mashable and TechCrunch via Twitter
• Mike Arrington asked if CNN was also down in Hong Kong
• I asked Joey in HK if it was out for her
• Thijs confirmed it was out in Beijing
• Anguslau then tweeted it was out in HK
• Marc and Chris said CNN was on in Shanghai
• Ken then confirmed CNN was back on again
• Mengli said it was definitely blocked for him in Zhengzhou
• Alex said it was working fine in Dalian
• Andrew said it was jittery in Beijing but working ok
• Thijs confirmed it was still blocked for him
• Ken tweeted he was wrong, it was in fact still blocked for him in Shanghai
• Guerel says CNN.com was working in Kunshan but CNN TV was blocked.

wow. talk about dizzy. all this in a span of an hour with posts on TechCrunch, Mashable and Gawker going up on the topic. the only problem is, it seems as soon as posts are published, the situation changes again...

...as i was saying before, it's blocked! ...oh wait, it's unblocked...no, it's blocked again! ...oh no i think it's unblocked... wait, wait...it's blocked for real! ...no wait, i think it's really not...

(sigh) blocked or unblocked...i say just unblock it all already as creating all this confusion by patchy instances of censorship isn't exactly helping them to win the PR game either...