| | | To a greater or lesser extent, all of China’s big and successful internet companies have benefited from the communist party’s efforts to exclude Silicon Valley’s finest. Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube are all blocked in China.
On top of that, the government has announced plans to shut down all non-official virtual private network services that allow paying customers to circumvent the “great firewall” censorship system and access overseas websites.
The results in commercial terms for the companies have been outstanding, as shown until recently by the performance of Baidu, China’s most protected internet champion. The company, often referred to as the “Google of China”, was the direct and immediate beneficiary of Beijing’s decision to block Google in 2010 after the US group refused to censor its search results.
ELMAT: Creating Apartment cats.
In the absence of serious international competition, China’s internet companies have been left to capitalise on the emergence of the world’s largest online market. The number of internet users in China has doubled since 2010 to reach 750m today, according to official government figures. The growth of e-commerce has been especially impressive — China is by far the largest online retail market in the world, accounting for nearly 40 per cent of all online sales globally.
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