II. Western Ways Gradually Influencing the East

The Internet has helped China go out into the world, and it has also helped the world become more familiar with China.

The rapid development of China’s Internet over the last 30 years was also a process in which Chinese Internet companies learned from the established and outstanding Internet companies from the West, particularly those in the United States. One can to varying degrees find traces of international Internet pioneers, again particularly the Americans, on the Chinese Internet companies that emerged from that first wave of Internet entrepreneurship at the turn of the century. Sohu essentially modeled itself after Yahoo’s business model when it was getting started; the inspiration for the design of Tencent’s first instant messaging product, QQ, came from ICQ; Baidu was known for quite a long time as the Chinese-speaking world’s Google; and the first version of Taobao, an online shopping website, was seen by some as eBay without PayPal; and when Meituan.com, a group buying website, was in its embryonic stage, it unabashedly referred to itself as China’s Groupon.

On the other side of the coin, while Chinese Internet companies were learning from their US counterparts, they never stopped their own localized innovation. Tencent’s founding team keenly observed that Chinese users used public computers to chat online in Internet cafes rather than using their computers in their own homes like users in developed countries did. Therefore, keeping chat histories on servers instead of locally was a feature highly desired by users. Tencent accordingly designed QQ in a way where users could send offline chat messages. Similarly, Taobao during its earliest stage was competing with eBay.cn, which had a nearly 80% share of the Chinese market. In such an extremely vulnerable state, Taobao painstakingly created a zero transaction fee model that would be very attractive to small to medium-sized businesses, rolled out AliWangWang as a tool to facilitate communication between buyers and sellers on the webpage in real time, and set up a guarantee function for Alipay, its online payment tool, which ultimately led to Taobao defeating its competitor in its own backyard.

Entering the era of the mobile Internet, China’s Internet companies are no longer just followers. All sorts of innovative and original applications have been created in a market as large as the Chinese market. If we can still see traces of WeChat’s foreign predecessors such as Line and WhatsApp in its basic version, it has become a unique and incomparable product after WeChat rolled out Moments, Official Accounts, and Mini Programs. The New York Times, in a YouTube video titled “How China Is Changing Your Internet” that was viewed 870,000 times, summarized that one could probably understand WeChat as a super app that has integrated into one app all of WhatsApp, Facebook, PayPal, Skype, Uber, Amazon, Instagram, Venmo, Tinder, and some other functions that do not exist outside of China such as hospital check-in, investment advising, and urban heat maps. The New York Times reporter, who was astonished by China’s applied innovation, exclaimed at the beginning of the video, “If you are currently in the United States or Europe, then you have probably never used Chinese apps, but if you actually want to know how the Internet will evolve, then China, which was once known for producing cheap goods, may offer you a guide to the future.”