Are most of those numbers that surprising considering China's population? To me, it's not very interesting that a country with a huge population has a huge amount of graduates, etc.
It is. Weibo doesn't do well outside of China, it is not international like Twitter is.
> that PayPal is the only really huge payments service
From the perspective of a non-China resident, that is definitely true.
> Amazon and eBay are the major players in ecommerce
Ditto. Though Taobao is trying to become a major international player.
> For any service you can think of in the US, there's one in China that might be even bigger.
Except the services in the US are mostly international. The services in China are almost always limited to just China. The fact that UnionPay is the largest ATM network in the world (by users...almost all in mainland China) doesn't mean diddly when I visit the Netherlands or India where my ATM card is USELESS.
China has decided they can lock out international internet services (via the GFW) and build their own isolated network. Internally, it is huge, but the isolation cuts both ways.
Chinese Internet companies are still quite Confucian in their organization with meaningless titles and lots of seniority plays; they are hardly flatter than the typical American internet company. Many of them still rely on freaking time cards for their tech workers, for crying out loud!
Amazon does well in China; we order things from them all the time (even rice).
They would have some market shares but not very much, just like Amazon.com is a small player and one of few foreign survivors in China although I also like its service. In the past, MSN messenger, Yahoo, Google, eBay, MySpace, to name a few, all failed in competition with local China players. That is not by chance.
As for management, the biggest problem of foreign companies is that decisions especially critical ones are always made in USA, which is normally slow and ignorant. And founders and top guys in China companies(still very young at their 20s or 30s) like Pony Ma at Tencent and Robin Li at Baidu can directly attention the specifics of key products or services even at pixel level.
Who will win?
Then why doesn't the CCP just unblock twitter, facebook, g+, and so on? I have a hard time to believe its for reasons of porn (easy to find in the GFW) or subversion (also easy to find in the GFW). And how do you explain Facebook's success in HK and Taiwan? People outside of China just being afraid of Chinese services? That could make sense...
> As for management, the biggest problem of foreign companies is that decisions especially critical ones are always made in USA, which is normally slow and ignorant.
The biggest problem is that we can't play very well at all in the market. First, foreign companies have to follow all the rules very strictly: local companies have the ability to be "flexible" until (and if!) the government cracks down; they also don't have to deal with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The lawyers of most foreign companies also won't go near ambiguous China privacy and secrecy laws with a 100 ft. pole, meaning anything that deals with data or communication inside the GFW absolutely requires a local partner (say TomTom).
I have friends who worked or are working for local companies, and they tell stories of extreme shadiness. These are not even small no-name companies, but companies you've probably heard of before; I won't name names since the foreign community that works in these companies is very small. They work very hard, but the market is cut throat and they do what they need to do to survive.
It seems that you believe China government helped local players succeed. That is not true in general. The private local Internet companies are not the government's child. They are mostly controlled by foreign investors.
Actually except Baidu vs. Google, you can not think out other examples the government made big impact. The other competitions in Internet between Yahoo vs. Sina, eBay/Amazon vs. Taobao/JD, MSN messenger vs. QQ, are all good counter-examples.
Foreign companies can not adapt to needs from local users. That is the key. The market is the king to decide the fates of Internet companies and products in China generally. Others are important but not critical.
And yet, all those companies do very well in HK, Singapore, Taiwan; aren't they Chinese also? Why is the mainland market so different from other smaller Chinese markets? They also do well in Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal, India...while the Chinese companies...they are just going to be stuck being local.
HK and Taiwan are too small market to have strong enough local team.
Supposedly, Chinese internet companies should do well in HK/Taiwan, these markets are definitely open to them, but since they don't have to compete with international brands in the mainland, they are not competitive enough to operate very well on the outside. Besides, any service run inside China is taboo outside of China (and Americans think the NSA is bad...).
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/08/business/globa...
summarizes the situation better than any of the one-dimensional stats from the article.