I’ve been in contact with quite a selection of “the average Chinese citizen in the streets”, and I can tell you — it’s not exactly a Twitteropolis (or a Fanfou-opolis, if we’re to use a localized service). Indeed, Isaac Mao is out there on Twitter, and so are Carol Lin, Siok Siok Tan, and just too many folks to mention one-by-one. But the thing is, these are people who can understand quite a bit of English.
What about those of us who have no idea about the Anglican tongue? That, actually, isn’t something big — as in the language barrier. There’s Fanfou for those lost in English. But then there’s another factor — the lack of people microblogging in Beijing. I’ve asked quite a selection of my friends: here’s how they stack up:
• Just about every one of those people use QQ
• Quite a lot of them use MSN (Windows Live Messenger)
• Some write blogs
• Some of them are on Xiaonei (the “Chinese Facebook” if you must)
• Few of them are on Fanfou
• Even less are on Twitter
And all of them have a mobile phone.
This is beginning to be quite “something” to me, now a Twitterholic being watched over (or “supervised” if you must use the Chinese term) by over 130 followers on my every last move. I think what’s most likely the case is that they consider microblogging too new, and that they think it’s something related to “privacy” — nobody tweets just to tell those following them what subway line they’re taking right now.
On the other hand, just about every expat I know (via Facebook or Twitter) are avid Twitter-ers. I think Twitter has this very “Friendship Store”-ish feeling: you know each other in the expat circle, but you’re on something “foreign”. There’s this gap between the expats and the locals.
Oh well, no fear. I personally hope to launch a community soon bridging the gap between the local Web 2.0 and the bigger, more “international” one beyond national borders. I’ve done one for Mac users already, and I just finished one for Beijing as a whole.
Let me just close this post out with a reference to a Swiss mag — Die Brückenbauer, or The Bridge Builders. I actually like doing that…
I use Fanfou。
And try to publish my “what am i doing” to both of them。