In January this year, a man in China’s Bozhou city received a parking fine. He wasn’t happy about it. “Grandma’s legs!” he wrote on WeChat Moments, using a light Chinese curse. “I only parked for ten minutes to pick up my kid and it’s a 100 yuan fine.”
The next day, the local police wrote their own post on Weibo, a kind of Chinese Twitter. The post reported that a man in Bozhou county had been summoned to the police station and arrested for “creating a bad influence.” The post included a picture of the man’s WeChat post, complete with his mild swearing.
According to WhatsonWeibo, a site that monitors Chinese social media, the police’s post spread quickly. Within an hour, it had been seen 500,000 times. And then it disappeared. The police had deleted it.
Both the post and its disappearance provoked a lively discussion on both WeChat and Weibo. Some people argued that the police were overreacting. Others wondered what other swearing could get them an invitation to the police station.
The story revealed a couple of important characteristics of China’s social media environment. First, it’s woven deeply into everyday life. When someone is moved to share a parking fine with a photo and some light swearing on their phone with anyone who wants to see it, it’s clear that China’s platforms are publishing the same kind of daily trivia that we’ve grown used to seeing on Instagram and Facebook. When a post can reach half a million people in less than an hour, it’s also clear that social media in China is highly capable of creating and spreading viral posts.
But second, it’s also clear that posting on China’s social media isn’t free of consequences. While Facebook is resisting calls to remove dishonest advertising from its platform, and bots and trolls are spreading disinformation freely on Twitter, China’s social media users risk facing arrest if they so much as use a mild swear word on a platform—especially if they use it against the police.
Those two characteristics are vital to bear in mind in any discussion of China’s social media environment. According to Statista, TenCent’s WeChat has more than 1.15 billion monthly active users. That’s about half the number of Facebook’s users although the platform is also much younger. WeChat wasn’t created until 2011, when Facebook was already seven years old.
But China’s social media is also closely monitored, and that monitoring is extremely effective. Shortly after the #MeToo movement took off in the United States, Luo Xixi, a Chinese expatriate living in California, wrote a long post on Weibo, describing how she had been harassed by her supervisor when she had been a PhD student at Beihang University.
That post went viral too. State media picked it up as well as social media. The professor was sacked. Other women in China started writing their own stories using a local #MeToo hashtag. The development of a new movement over which they had no control spooked the authorities. A little over two weeks after Luo Xixi published her story, posts carrying the #MeToo hashtag were blocked across China’s social media platforms. Posts and chat pages that had already been made about the topic were removed.
China’s social media users responded to the ban by looking for ways around the problem. Instead of using the #MeToo hashtag, they started using emojis for rice and rabbits, which in Mandarin Chinese are pronounced “mi” and “tu.”
Sometimes though, the censorship goes far deeper than hashtag whack-a-mole. In June last year, the BBC’s China correspondent Stephen McDonell took pictures of memorials held in Hong Kong to mark 30 years since the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on protestors in Tiananmen Square. He posted the pictures on WeChat Moments, and soon received questions from Chinese friends asking what they were commemorating. McDonell answered—“cryptically,” he said—then found that he was locked out of the application entirely:
when I tried to log back in, a new message appeared: “This WeChat account has been suspected of spreading malicious rumours and has been temporarily blocked…”
In order to unblock his account McDonell had to first create a faceprint by holding up his phone, and provide a voiceprint by reading out a series of numbers in Mandarin Chinese. With face recognition technology installed in video cameras around China, the Chinese government had made it easier to track the BBC’s correspondent wherever he went and whenever he talked on his phone.
It’s WeChat Everywhere
The reason that people are prepared to go through this process is because social media applications in China have become so much more than platforms for sharing news, opinions, and brand information. The landscape is varied, with apps for messaging and video watching, but one app dominates.
WeChat, or Weixin, is the biggest and the most complex of China’s social media environment. At its simplest, the application functions like WhatsApp, providing both one-to-one and group chats. Moments, where people who receive parking tickets go to swear and complain, is more like Facebook. Post images, videos or text to Moments, and people in your contact list can see them, like, and comment.
That feature provides space for brands and companies to push content to users, just like Facebook, but already a gap starts to develop here between Western social media apps and Chinese social media applications. To follow a brand on Facebook, users need to open the application, search for the brand and press “follow”. In China, QR codes have taken off in a way they never really have in the West.
Shops in China display QR codes that can be scanned directly from the application, making following brands simple and quick. And that ease of use extends to personal connections too. When people in China swap contacts, they don’t tap in phone numbers. Instead, one will open their personal QR code in their WeChat profile, and other will scan it into the app. In a second, the two are connected on WeChat. The QR code can also be printed and included on business cards. It’s a process that makes building contacts very simple.
But the biggest difference between WeChat and Western social media apps is the payment system. WeChat incorporated a payment system in 2013, encouraging users to connect their bank accounts to the app in order to both send and receive money, as well as make commercial payments, including for utilities and household bills. Stores soon began to display not just the QR code for the WeChat page but a QR code for payment. To pay in a store, customers can simply scan the code and enter an amount or open their own WeChat QR code and display it to the cashier for scanning. By 2015, the value of mobile payments in China had reached $235 billion, an amount higher than in the US. Facebook’s digital payment system, launched in November 2019, appears to have fizzled more than rocketed. WeChat’s payment system was popular from the start.
There were a few reasons for that rapid take-up. One was cultural. In addition to direct payments, WeChat also allowed users to send “red envelopes”. These are cash gifts traditionally given on holidays and special events such as weddings and birthdays. On WeChat, however, they also took the form of a game. Users can send members of a group an equal amount of money in a red envelope or they can place conditions on the amounts received. The first people to tap on the red envelope, for example might receive a random share of the amount with none left for people who tap late. Red envelopes can also have expiry dates, forcing people to move fast or lose their gifts. To help increase take-up, TenCent, the maker of WeChat, launched a carefully planned marketing blitz that included sponsoring the annual Spring Festival television gala, a show watched by about 700 million people. Viewers who shook their phones as they watched the show, would receive a red envelope. In 2015, the company used the red envelope feature to give away $80 million to viewers of the show.
The gamification of the payment system was a huge success but it’s likely that the payment system would have taken off anyway. In a country with relatively low credit card penetration, the application has provided an easier alternative to cash than applying for a card at the bank. The result is that whether you’re taking a taxi, buying a coffee, or ordering a train ticket in China, you’re unlikely to touch a bill or a coin (and you’ll often struggle to receive change if you do).
But there is a third reason for WeChat’s ability to successfully extend beyond WhatsApp-style chat and Facebook-style sharing. And that’s protectionism. The reason that credit card penetration is low in China is that Visa, Mastercard, and others aren’t able to reach Chinese consumers. In 2012, the WTO responded to a complaint from the US by ruling that China was discriminating against foreign payment providers by blocking access to foreign credit cards. It took China another two years to agree to open the market, and five more years before it launched an application process for the companies. In January 2019, China’s central bank still hadn’t acknowledged or formally accepted the applications. Had the credit card companies been able to do business in China earlier, consumers might have been content with the payment methods they had and been less willing to pay with their phones.
Google, Twitter, Facebook and their subsidiaries are all inaccessible in China too. If Facebook had been allowed entry when it launched, WeChat might not have been able to gain the penetration it needed to ensure a network effect.
None of this is certain. It’s possible that a local competitor with better local knowledge would have beaten Facebook and Visa anyway. But there’s no doubt that having an open space in which to experiment gave Chinese companies like WeChat and Baidu, the equivalent to Google, an opportunity to grab and hold market share.
That means that Western social media applications will struggle to catch up with the Chinese social media environment. They face tougher competition. Consumers are already used to using credit and debit cards, and stores are used to accepting them. Facebook’s attempt to create a new cryptocurrency tied to its system should be seen as a way to run around that competition; if consumers become used to using a different kind of currency online, their credit cards will become less useful. Facebook can’t prise consumers away from their Visas and Mastercards. But they can try to reinvent spending online.
It’s not working out. Opposition from regulators have put the future of the project in jeopardy. Consumers continue to see Facebook as only a place to share news with friends and family, and see news from brands. They see WeChat as only a smart texting application not a commercial payments hub. And they see Instagram as a place to share and consume visual content. If they want to make payments, there’s always Venmo for small amounts or Paypal for larger ones.
Mark Zuckerberg might dream of Facebook becoming as comprehensive a service as WeChat is in China, a single platform that covers news, personal texting, and commercial payments. But as long as each of those services has strong, established competitors, he’ll only be able to deliver a single function to a single market. That’s preferable to the fate of Chinese consumers who now conduct all of their digital life through a single colossus of a company overseen by an even more powerful state. It’s no wonder they’re swearing.
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