DSL Magazine: Issue 11

5 The Internet, The history of the internet in China has been written countless times. Its iconic beginning is usually dated to the first email sent from China to Germany in 1987, after which a period of unrest delayed the development of widely accessible network infrastructure for almost a decade (Hauben 2005). Around the mid-1990s, the first waves of Chinese users started accessing the World Wide Web through university connections and expensive personal computers. By the end of the decade, the Chinese internet user population reached four million (Du 1999). The first years of networked communications were relatively free from state control, and amateur creative practiced flourished on media formats such as e-mail, Bulletin Boards, and personal homepages. Confronted with a largely English-language Web, Chinese users devised input methods to type Chinese characters, created ASCII emoticons and graphics, and experimented with HTML coding to create their websites reflecting their identities and passions. Along with the Chinese vernacular Web also came the first versions of what would later become massive web portals and internet companies - Alibaba, Sohu, Netease, Sina, and so on all moved their first steps in the burgeoning internet craze of the late 1990s. In China, the internet grew as an industry during the 2000s, with portals vying for a rapidly growing audience and developing into content distributors, service providers and social platforms: news, games, messaging services, discussion forums, email inboxes and personal profiles became playgrounds for the first Chinese online communities. Around the mid-2000s, blogs revolutionized vernacular creativity: as the accelerating influx of new users brought a hundred million people online, this new format allowed everyone to set up a personal page and start sharing content (Yu, 2007). Most of the major internet companies started offering blogging platforms, and blogs supported the rise of the first online celebrities; by the end of the decade, the blog shrank into weibo, or ‘microblogging’, a new sort of social platform limiting posts to a few lines of text or a few images. The two most successful microblogging platforms, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, capitalized on China’s massive shift towards smartphones and mobile internet access to grow into thriving arenas of public debate and media spectacle (Sullivan, 2014). As media scholar Yang Guobin has noted, this growth has resulted in a noticeable localization of the medium: The Internet in China has become domesticated to the extent that it is now possible, even necessary, to talk about the Chinese Internet, as opposed to the Internet in China. “Domesticated” here means “localized” more than “tamed”. “Localized”, however, does not mean that the Chinese Internet is not global or that it has become an intranet. It still has global features, and yet it has assumed distinctly Chinese characteristics. (Yang 2012, p. 52) Yang’s suggestion has been widely embraced by both academic discussions and media reports, as the “Chinese internet” has become a common subject of debate and analysis - both as a technical assemblage and as a socio-cultural form. In terms of technological features, the Chinese internet is often conceptualized as a digital media ecosystem composed of national internet companies and infrastructures, bounded by state control over international gateways. In socio-cultural terms, the Chinese internet indexes a wide variety of creative practices, genres of content, and social phenomena, each with its peculiar aesthetics.