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How China Is Changing Your Internet
Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market:
Home or Everywhere Else
HONG KONG -
For teenagers who like to sing along with Ariana Grande and Flo Rida, Musical.ly is a must-have.
The app that lets users lip-sync and dance in their own music videos boasts 100 million users and partners with pop stars like Ms. Grande and Meghan Trainor.
It’s not easy to tell Musical.ly is Chinese — and that’s deliberate. To find success in America, its parent company has ignored China, its home market and a country with 700 million internet users.
The reason is simple, says Alex Zhu, co-founder of Shanghai-based Musical.ly:
China’s internet is fundamentally different from the one used in much of the rest of the world.
“It’s still very difficult to get into China,” said Mr. Zhu, who studied civil engineering at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou. “It’s a closed environment, and you have to be quite different to compete in that market.”
Two decades after Beijing began walling off its homegrown internet from the rest of the planet, the digital world has split between China and everybody else. That has prevented American technology companies like Facebook and Uber, which recently agreed to sell its China operations, from independently being able to tap the Chinese market.
For China’s web companies, the divide may have even more significant implications.
It has penned in the country’s biggest and most innovative internet companies. Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent have grown to be some of the world’s largest internet companies, but they rely almost entirely on domestic businesses.
Their ventures abroad have been mostly desultory, and prognostications that they will challenge American giants internationally have not materialized.
Chinese Tech Firms Forced to Choose Market:
Home or Everywhere Else
HONG KONG -
For teenagers who like to sing along with Ariana Grande and Flo Rida, Musical.ly is a must-have.
The app that lets users lip-sync and dance in their own music videos boasts 100 million users and partners with pop stars like Ms. Grande and Meghan Trainor.
It’s not easy to tell Musical.ly is Chinese — and that’s deliberate. To find success in America, its parent company has ignored China, its home market and a country with 700 million internet users.
The reason is simple, says Alex Zhu, co-founder of Shanghai-based Musical.ly:
China’s internet is fundamentally different from the one used in much of the rest of the world.
“It’s still very difficult to get into China,” said Mr. Zhu, who studied civil engineering at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou. “It’s a closed environment, and you have to be quite different to compete in that market.”
Two decades after Beijing began walling off its homegrown internet from the rest of the planet, the digital world has split between China and everybody else. That has prevented American technology companies like Facebook and Uber, which recently agreed to sell its China operations, from independently being able to tap the Chinese market.
For China’s web companies, the divide may have even more significant implications.
It has penned in the country’s biggest and most innovative internet companies. Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent have grown to be some of the world’s largest internet companies, but they rely almost entirely on domestic businesses.
Their ventures abroad have been mostly desultory, and prognostications that they will challenge American giants internationally have not materialized.
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