Personal Blog of Carl Pei

The USA has the most internet users in the World, estimated at 162-210 million. Just several years ago, the internet would collectively become slower when the American’s woke up and got online.

In recent years, internet connectivity has developed tremendously in China. In the June 2007 reports published by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC), it was estimates that China has 162 million internet users. Although, as a country, the percentage of those who know English is very small, Chinese internet users are mainly below 30 and of the new generation. These people are generally much better at English compared to their predecessors and love western culture and media (and websites ). China is also home to many tens of thousands of English speaking expats from the US, UK and Australia. This is definitely not a market to neglect.

On my site Meizu Me, around 3% of the users are from China. This might seem small and insignificant, but still accounted for more than 2,500 unique hits last month. I can’t afford to lose that amount of traffic - can you?

Problem With The Chinese Internet Market

In China, the internet is censored. Websites (and sometimes even entire IP ranges) with information against the government is blocked. This is done automatically by a spider crawling for certain censored keywords. If found on a page, it will be blocked.

You don’t have to make your site in Chinese, just make sure it’s accessible from China. To check if your site works, there are 3 ways:

1. Use a Chinese proxy through your browser. You can find one here.
2. There is a website that claims to check for you, but I have found it to be very inaccurate. Prior to coming to China, it showed that many of my sites were blocked. But after I arrived, I realized that they all work.
3. The third option is to let me check for you. Post your URLs in the comment and I’ll check to see if they work here.

If your site is blocked, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your domain is. Many server IPs on shared hosts are blocked, because neighboring sites may have anti-CCP (Chinese Communist Party) information. To fix this, you can ask your host to move you to a different server, or ask them to assign you a unique IP (this usually costs around $35 USD).

If your domain is blocked, there is not much you can do. It is much like being blacklisted by Google. You can remove the infringing content, wait and hope to get unblocked. Unblocking happens, witnessed by the recent unblocking of Wikipedia.