Community Growth in China – Online and Off-line

Hong Kong Street at Midnight

A significant factor in social networking is giving consideration to how people naturally communicate and build communities. In this way, looking at off-line community trends can shed some light on how online communities will perform and interact. 

China Off-Line

In China off-line communities form and behave in very different ways to those in the USA or other western countries.

First and foremost is the sense of family. Due to the One Child Policy, most young people, born after 1979, have no siblings by birth. Instead, groups of children who were close friends from a young age and have lived near one-another for many years form relationships which they referrer to as familial. That is to say, much later in life, someone may refer to another person as their brother or sister in passing conversation although they are not related by birth

Similarly social relationships are often built out of immediate necessity and thereby used to maintain some sort of serviceable relationship. In China social circles aim to include people with a convenient set of influences but are often built purely by exposure to or participation within a community, as opposed to active networking in the way it is found in the USA. In this respect the network structure can be stagnant for a large portion of the population, though people tend to have very reliable networks and are very willing to participate and contribute to the community.

An interesting phenomenon in China are the ad-hoc summer evening social activity involving large groups of people congregating around parks and paved areas where they can simply sit and chat, or do exercise or allow their children to meet others. The dynamics in a situation like this are very different from those found in similar social scenes in the USA. People in this context are also quite willing to cross communicate and interact on an informal level. It is a highly connected network with little functional significance associated with the strength of a specific, human to human connection.

 China Online

Online community trends in China are similar to the day to day habits there.  For instance most people are interested in expanding their networks when they get the opportunity, even in situations when in the United States people might shy away for various social construction related reasons. People seem really happy to connect when they can. However, most services online are not designed around creating new connections with people whom one does not know, or at least, people with whom one does not have an inroad to know. It is almost as though, if you meet someone without the appropriate context it is not a significant meeting. 

One potential area of growth for Chinese web communities is a platform which allows its users to easily build casual relationships with other users, within the framework of their social building methodology, without the restrictions of a overwhelmingly structured user identity, or the confusion of too many options and immediate networking opportunities. Interestingly, further growth, after gaining a proportionally small threshold group of users, is relatively easy as the Chinese market is very thick with real life social networks and existing communities. The high population density and a culture of social activity lead this to be the case. 

Consuming Together

An important aspect of this situation that should not be forgotten is the expectation of high accessibility to media and media related interactions such as sharing. The Chinese web experience includes a lot of media consumption and on some occasions this is a group experience. An example of this is a common situation in internet cafes in which users will watch online movies, often at HD resolution, and simultaneously engage in two person video chats with many friends scattered around the region, presumably doing the same sort of thing. The market for tools that help people consume what is free or easily available is already quite crowded. Media as an inroad to community building, however, is a market that is largely untapped.