Huge numbers capture the imagination, while some numbers merely surprise, and still other numbers only reaffirm or validate an expectation. China’s Internet users now top 253 million, the highest globally. This announcement by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) falls into that final category: After all it was only a matter of time before China’s Internet users surpassed those of the formerly-number-one (and birthplace of the net itself) United States, because China’s overall Internet usage rate even now stands at less than 20 percent, versus more than 70 percent in the US.

Since the time of the Great Wall and its first population estimates, China has been a nation of superlatives. Currently it has the longest bridge, the fastest train, the biggest shopping mall, and so on. We even covered this in Supertrends of Future China as the propensity to over-build infrastructure for

1. expected growth (Bejing’s new T3, the world’s biggest air terminal and building);
2. prestige or attention-getting (how about the once-planned 13-mile concrete dragon project);
3. and lack of financial restraints and stakeholder safeguards (easy lending terms, land grabs).

(In fact, a whole book was recently written about just the urbanization and infrastructure trends alone, the aptly-named Concrete Dragon)

Back to China’s Netizen population, I’m with ImageThief in believing the absolute numbers themselves are not as important the stories behind the data, the context. For example, what exactly are China’s estimated 253 million Internet users doing on the web?

A whole lot of blogging going on

China has more than 107 million blogs and spaces as of the end of June 2008, according to the latest CNNIC survey. This is up from 73 million last November, growing 46.5 percent. Active bloggers have increased to 70 million, up from 47 million last November, growing almost 50 percent in seven months. Who are the most popular bloggers?

Although QQ.com and 163.com are the recognized leaders in blog hosting in China, Sina.com hosts three of the top bloggers: Director/actress/writer/traveler Xu jinglei, singer/actor/writer/race car driver Han Han, writer/model/TV personality Acosta.

Each blogger has more than 170 million accumulated visits, with Xu Jinglei topping 180 million to be China’s (and by some measures, the world’s) most popular online personality.

Other rankings, such as BlogRank.cn, put Bill Gates’ personal blog as the 6th most popular, while a movie review blog written by a Chinese girl named duoduo is ranked number one, followed by another multi-talented actress/model/writer Yang Gongru.

It seems that China’s blogosphere rankings are ruled by the individual, unlike most US rankings, which tend to be dominated by gadget and gossip sites (e.g. Endagadget, Perez Hilton, Gawker) and collaborative works (e.g. The Huffington Post, BoingBoing), or the occasional celebrity blogger (e.g. Rosie O’Donnel).

China’s most popular blogs, on the other hand, retain a kind of casual atmosphere where down-to-earth celebrities write about what’s on their minds without slick product or site tie-ins. In China, monetization of blogger content (a la Google AdWords, or paid sponsorships) is only in its nascent stage and most popular bloggers elect to be site-hosted rather than self-hosted with their own URL. To be sure, some may be paid to post on those sites to draw in advertisers, but very few of the 70 million active bloggers would fall into that category.

Gawker recently lamented that too many people in the US blogged for free; in China, pretty much everyone blogs for free, and parlaying online popularity into real-life money or fame is a still seldom occurrence.

It’s clear to me that China’s blogosphere has much growth potential and opportunities yet to come.

(Come back for part two of this story on Monday.)

In a recent post on China’s Human Flesh Search engine, I discussed how the behavior of Netizens in China can be harnessed for good and ill to solve social problems. Occasionally, the online forums in China become vitriolic (much as they do anywhere) for reasons related to China’s strong sense of cohesiveness (which we describe in Supertrends of Future China as a key driver of China’s major trends).

The following article, reprinted (and updated) from my newspaper column on May 23, details how some Netizens have a new target for their anger: Governments, people, and companies that do not donate enough for earthquake relief. While the outpouring of praise for donating companies is generally strong, the praise is reserved mostly for Chinese companies, while the anger is often directed at foreign-related entities.  While there are exceptions when it comes to foreign individuals, the reaction to foreign companies’ donations is often negative even in the face of a large contributions.

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In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, the generosity and compassion of corporations has been put on display by using donation lists in building lobbies, office memos, online bulletin boards, and newspaper articles.

While corporate donors in many foreign countries, if they are listed at all, might be shown alphabetically, here the common practice is to rank organizations together with the amount of money they give and circulate the rankings for all to see.

As a form of peer pressure, this method seems very effective in China in encouraging contributions. But at the same time, lists of foreign corporate donations have caused controversy on China’s online forums.

In the days following the disaster, the netizen community quickly shifted to discussions about the donations of foreign countries and multinationals because the pre-earthquake controversies such as the Olympic torch relay and Carrefour were still unresolved. A new theme has been that there were insufficient earthquake relief donations by multinationals.

In a comment echoed on numerous online forums, netizen “Botage” wrote on Sina.com’s community page on May 15, “Why do foreign companies give so little? Take McDonald’s, KFC, Nokia… they give even less than Chinese companies, it is terrible.”

Another netizen on Sohu.com, “Zongq,” writes, “China has given these foreign companies and brands such a huge market and profits, but when something like the earthquake happens in China, we actually don’t see even humanitarian aid (from them).”

This has had some unfortunate implications for the multinational companies doing business in China, with some Chinese Netizens calling into question their commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility while Chinese companies are lauded for their generosity.

The wave of criticism about donations started against the US government, for donating only US$500,000 to the Chinese Red Cross when it had offered millions more in aid to Myanmar. (Editor’s note: The US also donated 10 million to the International Red Cross to be earmarked for China. In fact, aid to Myanmar was pledged but either not accepted or not delivered because of prevailing political conditions, whereas aid flowed to China much more easily: More here.)

And when it comes to foreign money, even China’s own are not exempt from online criticism: Basketball superstar Yao Ming was pilloried in the media and online forums for “only” offering half a million yuan until he quadrupled his donation. From there, debate extended to how much Chinese firms were giving and how little foreign firms seemed to be giving. Is this criticism justified based on the facts?

Chinese companies have undoubtedly shown their support for the unfortunate in Sichuan. Seventy-five Chinese-listed companies have contributed more than 563 million yuan, nearly US$81 million, as of May 19, as reported by financial news portal Hexun.net (partial English translation here). There is no precedent to compare the actions of the national firms as a group, but donations by 75 large foreign firms, based on a similar ranking list published on the Chinese Website manage.org.cn, have reached about half the national firm’s figure, 350 million yuan as of May 20. Both groups likely have much more to give as time goes on.

One firm in particular, the State Grid Corporation of China, already contributed 76 million yuan in cash, almost US$11 million, and almost twice that in non-cash aid, to be recognized as China’s largest donor.

This firm also topped the Hurun Report’s 2008 Corporate Social Responsibility Ranking (English version, 2007 only, here) and is a paragon of how Chinese would like national corporate citizens to act. Another large donor is China Mobile which, in addition to a large cash donation of 86 million yuan, has also committed to donating possibly billions of yuan to mobile phone subscribers in the afflicted regions by automatically increasing every phone’s account by 100 yuan if it falls below a 50 yuan threshold. Large Chinese banks and insurance companies have also contributed significantly, such as the Bank of China’s 64 million yuan cash donation. Larger Chinese firms are typically donating at the 10 to 20 million yuan levels. Many foreign firms, contrary to netizen opinion, are well within this range.

For example, KFC has donated 15.8 million yuan, while Nokia donated 10 million yuan plus thousands of free mobile phones. The largest foreign donations to date, 30 million yuan each, come from Samsung and Nike, but GE, Chevron, GSK, Toyota and others all have made donations at the 10 million yuan level or above. These are no small amounts by any standard.

It may therefore be said that foreign company donations in total are not as large as those of Chinese national firms, but should they be?

In the Hurricane Katrina disaster in the US in 2005, US corporations donated more than US$547 million, according to USAToday, while foreign firms contributed very little, most of the donations coming to the State Department via the donor countries directly.

Meanwhile, the small donation by the US government aside, US firms’ donations in China as of May 20 have totaled more than US$25 million, a significant amount by just one country’s corporations.

The time and distance factors should also be considered in evaluating foreign firms’ responses to the earthquake. It takes more time to communicate with head offices abroad, plan an appropriate assistance package, and select the best channels to deliver relief.

Many foreign firms likely elected to wait until the initial confusion after May 12 had settled down: Cisco Systems, initially making a donation of US$250,000, generously increased its commitment to more than US$ 1 million several days later, once the scope of the tragedy became known.

In the rush to be the first and highest on the lists, is it possible some people are losing sight of the real purpose of giving in times of need?

Foreign firms are certainly aware of the benefits of being in the Chinese market and take seriously their responsibilities as good corporate citizens, but they must be allowed the time to make a measured response and not be held to the same standards as companies in the country suffering from the disaster. And the most important point of all: no matter the source of the aid, it is for a common good and I think that nobody can disagree on that.

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Notes:

1 US$ = 7 RMB

The best resource I found for a total list of donations that is semi-regularly updated can be found here.

In the recent book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, author Clay Shirky discusses how new technologies for collaboration and information-sharing impact society. It is a fascinating analysis and commentary on how groups of people are collaborating and networking online in new and more efficient ways because of blogs, instant messaging, Twitter, Flickr and other new services. The types of group-forming he describes are sometimes called crowdsourcing and flash mobs. For those of us in China, we might better know crowdsourcing as the Human Flesh Search Engine, the increasingly frequent phenomenon of online crowds gathering via China’s bulletin board systems, chat rooms, and instant messaging to collaborate on a common task. The Human Flesh Search Engine shares many of the same characteristics of Shirky’s networked social collaboration: Enabled and made cost-effective by technology, channeling an existing motivation that was not possible to act upon as a group before.

In our own book, Supertrends of Future China, we describe what we call the Inter-Networking Supertrend, the new web-enabled version of the classic Chinese guanxi (which means ‘relationships’). China’s Human Flesh Search Engine is a poor translation (yet a popular and visceral description) of the Chinese phrase ren’rou sou’suo （人肉搜索）and was, for a day, Google’s homepage for its Chinese edition Googrle.cn (the page can still be found online here). The fact that day was April 1st should tell readers it was meant as tongue-in-cheek (and may not entirely be a joke - a number of search engines have tried human-assisted search and relevance checking), but it put a name to a movement that has been happening online in China for some time: Online collaboration by Netizens to search via the power of China’s massive 225 million Internet users.

The human search engine has been operating in China, for good and for ill, for at least a year or two already. We profiled several such instances in our book, such as the Kitten Killer of Hangzhou and the infamous Chinabounder blog, both of which involved an intensive human-assisted search that sometimes bordered on a lynch-mob mentality. There are numerous other cases: The South-China Tiger photogate and, in 2008, the misidentification of an Olympic torch relay protester, the 1970’s-style ’struggling against’ a Chinese student studying in America, and the ‘I (Heart) China’ movement that spread like wildfire over MSN to millions of Chinese users in two days.

Shirky’s ideas on the extraordinary power and occasional madness of online crowds would be an apt explanation for both the apparent effectiveness and mob mentality of the Human Flesh Search Engine. Profiling a case in the US of a person who lost a mobile phone, had it found by somebody who refused to return it, and the subsequent online tracking and debate over the people involved, Shirky wrote:

…The whole episode demonstrates how dramatically connected we’ve become to one another. It demonstrates the ways in which the information we give off about ourselves, in photos and e-mails and MySpace pages and all the rest of it, has dramatically increased our social visibility and made it easier for us to find each other but also to be scrutinized in public. It demonstrates that the old limitations of media have been radically reduced, with much of the power accruing to the former audience. It demonstrates how a story can go from local to global in a heartbeat. And it demonstrates the ease and speed with which a group can be mobilized for the right kind of cause.
But who defines what kind of cause is right?

As the cases of the Human Flesh Search Engine mentioned above clearly show, right is determined by a kind of process of consensus-building where the strongest, earnest, motivated voices may dominate, but as to whether the end result is right or wrong, as somebody once said, the mob has many heads but few brains. Where will China’s human flesh search engine strike next? We’ll keep you posted.

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We should add that Shirky’s book mostly deals with the postive aspects of group collaboration and the benefits it can bring to society and organization. We recommend any readers interested in this topic consider buying Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations or going to the book’s blog.