What do Western companies find hardest to grasp about chinas digital culture?
In China there are a lot of very young people on the internet who are experiencing the public sphere for the first time. There has never been this sort of medium for communication and young Chinese, experiencing this unsupervised, unfettered, anonymous and unaccountable means of expression, are real loose cannons. They can bruise a brand badly if it isn’t careful about how it engages. All this stuff happens on bulletin boards. In China they’re the main feature of many websites – 80% of websites in China have bulletin boards attached to them. There’s an enormous community around these things. They’re one of the few places that people can rant and rave, vent with total anonymity. How difficult is it to shut people down? It’s very difficult, especially because so much of this stuff is ephemeral. Not much of it has a political content – that won’t usually make it up. If you start posting your support for an independent, it will get removed. Automatic systems won’t let you post certain word
