By Star Chang, posted Aug 26, 2011 at 10:08 PM, 1,085 views,

The Chinese Web Is A Massive Intranet

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A researcher at Harvard University has calculated that 96 percent of all page views in China are to web sites hosted within China. That’s right, at the moment the Internet in China is more like a massive intranet. The extremely high proportion local web traffic in China may be the result of the success of the Chinese government in blocking the international sites, using their famous GFW with the help of Cisco. Facebook, YouTube, twitter and other many popular web services are not used by most of the China internet user. The Chinese can shop online at Taobao (aka China ebay) and watching videos on Youku (aka China YouTube), but they cannot reach out the world wide web …

According to the research from Harvard University, they have combined Google AdPlanner’s list of page views on China’s top 250 websites with their own databases of IP address registrations, and the result has showed that 96 percent of all page views in China are to web sites hosted within the country. There might be a possible margin of error, but 96 percent indicates the great extent of the parochial nature of the Chinese web. The most direct battleground in the fight over control of the Internet in China is local. It is happening that almost all Chinese web traffic are on the local Chinese services, the government certainly stand an important role on this. The researcher has stated that it might be because Chinese people like to read content written in Chinese characters which hosted at local websites, and run by Chinese companies.

Of course, the Great Firewall of China plays its part too. Not even the most intelligent researchers could say for sure if local web-video service like Youku would be so dominant in China if YouTube were not blocked. And what about Facebook or Google+, both social network services could topple Sina Weibo in China if they won’t get banned by the Chinese aurthority. The Harvard’s researcher himself is split on whether it’s the strict controls, or the variety of choice, that makes the Chinese web so internalized that now it almost become an intranet world. There are still Chinese web users who try to climb over the firewall for innocent purposes, such as checking back on their Facebook accounts, or looking for funny staff on YouTube, drag it down and re-post on their local websites. From time to time, such pratice is always stopped by the official. Despite a thriving web and tech scene in China, it is strange to see the Chinese web user are not conneting to the world.

Source: Hal Roberts via shanghaiist