So I know I said that next we'd be further discussing Tudou.com's effectiveness in China, but there's another story I want to address first! My Chinese teacher from Shanghai, China had a rather "disturbing" status on her Facebook page saying that she apologized for not responding to all of her fellow facebook friends, but she has been unable to access her page because of Chinese governement's current restriction on Facebook access. I found this interesting because while I was studying abroad in Shanghai, China at East China Normal University (the same college that Yao Ming attended), I noticed that many of my fellow Chinese peers had Facebook pages and visited the website regularly to communicate with school friends in China, friends they met from other counties, like myself, who were studying abroad, and to join groups pro or anti a cause.
As noted above, two of the most powerful abilities for the Chinese Facebook users are international communication and voiced opinion. Both of these abilities are threatening to a strict and "dictative" Chinese government that acts as a doorkeeper between its citizens and the outside world. When controversial events take place, such as, the riots in the western region of Xinjiang, China and Olympics protest, Chinese government tends to tighten the reigns on social networking sites that they don't control, and that have potential to leak "confidential" Chinese happenings to the "outside" world. This is currently posing a problem for sites like Twitter and Facebook.
As noted above, two of the most powerful abilities for the Chinese Facebook users are international communication and voiced opinion. Both of these abilities are threatening to a strict and "dictative" Chinese government that acts as a doorkeeper between its citizens and the outside world. When controversial events take place, such as, the riots in the western region of Xinjiang, China and Olympics protest, Chinese government tends to tighten the reigns on social networking sites that they don't control, and that have potential to leak "confidential" Chinese happenings to the "outside" world. This is currently posing a problem for sites like Twitter and Facebook.
A point that I will bring back up, is the difference between international appeal and limited local appeal. Unlike other networking sites that only cater to a predominately one language speaking audience, Facebook has become a somewhat international website because it is an English (western) based site. The Chinese government restrictions have serious potential to cripple Facebook's future profits, as China is an unsaturated market looking for and craving Facebook's capabilities, games, applications, and interactive capabilities...Facebook has to stratgeize and find ways to succesfully maintain in the Chinese market, especially with competition from websites such as Zhanzuo.com...A comparison on these two sites coming soon...
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