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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

China's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own.

The average citizen in China does not use any foreign websites to do anything [citation needed]. All the services you and I consume online are replicated in China by Chinese companies. From Gmail to Yahoo!, from Facebook to twitter, from Amazon to eBay, from CNN to FOX.

It's really no surprise you haven't heard of this (I haven't either). Very few such Chinese sites even attempt at marketing themselves out of mainland China (notable exemption being the original Alibaba marketplace to great effect, Taobao is apparently a different site by the same group). It's fascinating how the internet has so effectively bridged other cultures while keeping others at arm's length - even when connected and technically accessible.

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The reason for this is because the way the chinese internet is structured it all flows through a single back bone in and out of the country so that it can be easily censored or even cut off if needed. This means latency is terrible, when doing a traceroute out of china you can see the first hop outside the country adds at minimum 200ms. Then you factor into the fact that many sites like youtube, twitter, and facebook are blocked. The rest provide little or no content for chinese readers it is not surprising that the average chinese user never visits any foreign websites.

For every site that is created in a western country in english there is a chinese equivalent that will pop up within a few months that caters to chinese users and the chinese language. Western companies just dont care enough about the chinese users to create sites that they would be comfortable using

Don't care or just trying to avoid the legal quagmire that is China?

Maybe the censorship issues caused by the governmental firewall coupled with murky rules for doing business over the web in China, doesn't exactly translate into a business friendly environment?

well, i'd say that the unfriendly business environment lies in the usa, and europe. i look around China and see different car brands from throughout the world. however, when i go to western countries, the choices are limited to europe, usa, japan, and south korea. the same goes for other products. for example, there are abou 20 different tablet brands in China, however, in western countries, only a couple of them really dominate. China allows just about every brand of tablets, and mobile phones you can think of. however, the west is extremely limiting when it comes to the choices of brands. there are probably 5 different shoe brands in China that are the equivalent of nike, and adidas. they are called lining, 361, anta, peak, and xtep. in addition to selling these brands, China also welcome brands from the west, and throughout the world to be sold in China. my conclusion is that the west is much more business unfriendly than China. sure China does have some protectionist measures, but overall, after i have compared the two places, i find that i have much more choices in China than in the west. by the way, skype, ebay, and amazon all operate in China, and have millions of customers. on the other hand, how many taobao, 360buy, and uu customers can you find in europe?

> flows through a single back bone in and out of the country

This is false, actually the GFW is built in parallel with multiple backbones, which in very high bandwidth the censorship fails from time to time.

It's a language issue. I spent some time in a major inland Chinese city this year. 2 weeks in a city of 14m people and I didn't run into a single one that spoke sufficient English for a conversation.

> China's web, while accessible via the "regular" internet (vs things like Iran's and NK's version of the internet) is really an internet all to its own.

Same goes for Russia.. and in smaller scale to some other countries.

this is not because China isn't trying to market itself outside, it is because if China expands overseas, then it will threaten the interests of amazon, ebay, facebook, twitter, yahoo, gmail,cnn, and fox. if people had a chance to try out the Chinese version, 50% of them would choose the Chinese version instead. facebook, twitter, amazon, ebay, cnn, fox, gmail, and yahoo would absolutely retaliate by launching some kind of trade war, including all kinds of dirty tricks, sabatoge, etc. this is what China is afraid of, and this is why China is afraid to expand. why do you think most of the world uses gmail, yahoo, facebook, ebay, and twitter. it's not that they are unable to develop their own, it's that they don't want to break the unwritten rule, that is, do not threaten the business interests of american corporations. this is why the u.s. spends so much on military. if they had no military to back up their corporations, then people would simply go in their own direction, and the market would be up for grabs, but for now, it will stay firmly in the grips of the u.s. corps

So, for every new Chinese startup, are there hordes of people crying about why they haven't rolled out to America?

(I'm sorry, this comment isn't like me, but I couldn't resist.)

Why would people be crying that knockoffs of US sites have not rolled out to the US? Perhaps I missed your sarcasm...?

People in China are well-informed about all these companies overseas and often question about the Chinese version's originality. Companies like Amazon do have their own branch in China and it's not really that isolated as you seemed to suggest.

You can't really complain that Chinese companies exploit a market left untouched by culturally-ignorant Western companies. I bet if more US companies spent more time targeting the Chinese market in the right way (i.e. perfect i18n support, interfaces built with Chinese languages in mind etc), these knockoffs would get less traction.

(Of course there's always the political problem, the knockoffs are often State-sponsored etc etc, but I bet they'd suffer in face of superior competition, if they actually had real competition.)

Look what happens when western companies try? Google, for example...

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