Comments on: The Internet is local and Chinese do not link abroad

By: Priorities, people | Antony Loewenstein

Priorities, people | Antony Loewenstein — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 05:42:25 +0000

[...] There has been some discussion on several China blogs recently about a statistic that only six percent of the hyperlinks on the Chinese Internet are to websites outside of China. You can follow the discussion on BlogNation, Shanghaiist and chez Thomas Crampton, and also chez Rebecca MacKinnon, and Tobias Escher. [...]

By: Travellers’ Tales - The FEER Blog » China’s Insular Internet

Travellers’ Tales - The FEER Blog » China’s Insular Internet — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:38:24 +0000

[...] Via Tom Crampton’s blog, and also discussed here, a fascinating piece of research on the Chinese government’s success in walling off its cybercitizens. A key measure of connectedness for any site or group of sites is linking, and Professor Jonathan Zhu of City University of Hong Kong has found that only 6% of the links on Chinese sites point to sites outside the country. Moreover, 81% of the links were to sites within the same province. This seems to confirm the anecdotal evidence that the Internet in China tends to be more locality-centric. Although the research does not seem to address this, one factor could be the government’s efforts to discourage the development of civil society groups, and the blocking of foreign Web sites. [...]

By: China’s Internet rarely links to foreign websites

China’s Internet rarely links to foreign websites — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 09:25:32 +0000

[...] This is based on research into Chinese hyperlink behavior led by Professor Jonathan Zhu from City University of Hong Kong and highlighted on Tobias Escher’s excellent blog. [...]

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 08:56:28 +0000

Thank you.These findings are useful for me,a player in China.

By: Chinesen verlinken kaum nach außen auf Freie Netze. Freie Kultur.

Chinesen verlinken kaum nach außen auf Freie Netze. Freie Kultur. — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:45:26 +0000

[...] Wer mehr dazu wissen will, findet im Blog von Tobias Escher ein Schaubild sowie Links zu weiteren Seiten, die sich mit dem ‘Linkverhalten’ bestimmter Nutzergruppen beschäftigen. Geschrieben in Digitalkultur [...]

By: Hanteng

Hanteng — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:45:46 +0000

I guess in that research, Taiwan is left out again, right? Although Chinese government claims that Taiwan is just a province of China, when it comes to Internet, it might not be true.

Hence I am very curious about comparisons. First, of course, we can do comparisons with Taiwan and China since Taiwanese Internet data are much more open to research. If someone intends to interpret this as Chinese use of Internet are relatively local, then Taiwan serves a nice reference since we Taiwanese do use Chinese language (although traditional one) which is also a language barrier there.

Second, could similar research being done in a mid-west state in US? Can we compare?

According to my limited experience in China (5 month of backpacking), I guess such province-centered characteristic shown in websites linking is very straight-forward. Chinese people do not usually build their websites according to their provinces, but Chinese government does. If the local government and its agencies have majority of presence on the web, and if people especially those in net cafe tend to use the nation-wide services (even world-wide ones) instead of local ones, then it might tell a different story. What if for practical reasons (easier to use or self-censorship) when Chinese people do hyperlink abroad, they do it from websites abroad? The Internet savvy Falungon and liberal Chinese are the major examples.

In Taiwan we have our own local websites such as Hemidemi ( http://www.hemidemi.com ) for social bookmarking, hence I guess we have huge links abroad (especially in US and Japan) since it is part of the popular culture diffussion pattern now. The recent Cannes-award winning film “Lust Caution” and constant flow of Youtube links happening in such social bookmarking websites could make a huge difference in this kind of hyperlink-based research.

By: Shengyi Wu

Shengyi Wu — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 21:27:39 +0000

I think it’s probably because of the language restriction rather than the social networking issues.

Here is a website about Chinese Internet research, hope it interests you. http://english.iresearch.com.cn/html/Default.html

And thank you for knocking that door for me! Really appreciate it. Sorry for cann’t thank you in person this afternoon.

By: Nicolas Jondet

Nicolas Jondet — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 22:58:11 +0000

There’s an interesting post by Tomas Crampton, former writer for the New York Times and IHT on why it is difficult to get web stats from China:
http://www.thomascrampton.com/2007/10/16/why-are-chinas-web-stats-so-bad