Cultural and political difference b/w U.S. and China determines you can't apply the U.S. rules
to Chinese games. Otherwise you can easily come up with wrong conclusions. Here are a few
examples:
1) Government censorship risk
Chinese governments impose tight censors ONLY on sensitive political issues
( i.e., you can't challenge governments ) However, how many chinese people are really
paying attention to "democracy" now? They are more interested in sports, social chats,
travels, sex, making money, bla,bla, bla... There are enough contents to attract people to
visit the Web. Censorship has been imposed in China for more than 4 decades ( it is getting
more and more loose,however ), but entertainment business and public media are booming.
Censorship is bad politically, but it does not fed up audiance because this is the
only way they get political news and they get used to it. Censorship has minimal impacts
on china.com's bottom line.
2) Web pages are boring
Allen Sloans' article says china.com web pages are boring. He forgets china.com target
audiance is chinese, not americans. What interests chinese might not appeal to Allen Sloans
and vice versa.
3) backward infrastructure
This is a valid argument. However, just like "sharing phones" increase ACTUAL home
phone coverage rate in china, "sharing lines" also increase ACTUAL number of internet
users. As a matter of fact, "Web Bar" is becoming increasingly popular in china. People
go to bars to buy hours to surf the net. Things are not as bad as they appear to be.
As some posts have already pointed out, it is wiser to go after multinationals for investment
advice than journalists. When covering international affairs, journalists do very poor jobs.
They predicted chinese communist government would collapse after 1989 TianAnMen crackdown,
the currency would collapse amidst asian financial crisis, blaaaaa. Often they write their
wishes, not report facts. Just my two cents. |
