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iPhone Finally Welcomed by China, but Apple’s Not So Optimistic

Apple is busy preparing to enter the enormous Chinese market by introducing iPhone in cooperation with the second biggest Chinese telecom company—China Unicom. Although China’s approximately seven-hundred-million mobile user base seems like an inexhaustible profit source, many people doubt Apple will encounter the same predicament it faced when trying to launch iPhone in India.

In August 2008, Apple tried to sell iPhone to Indian mobile users but failed to create a market buzz. Some reports said journalists even outnumbered customers in iPhone’s launch parties in eight cities in India. There were two major factors that caused the lack-of-excitement situation. First, there was no effective marketing strategy. Second, the price was higher than what Indian users were willing to pay.

Apple definitely has learnt its lessen in India and will be more cautious with the Chinese market this time. First of all, it will abandon its traditional revenue-sharing model and earn money through wholesaling iPhones to China Unicom. Secondly, Apple and China Unicom will put more emphasis on marketing. According to Philip M. Nichols, an Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics from Wharton Business School, the hype had already started to build when he visited China in August. “You cannot go into Carrefour in Beijing right now without getting iPhone advertising right in your face. They are really advertising the heck out of it,” He said.

Another reason for China Unicom to stay optimistic about the potential sales is that there is immense demand for iPhone in China currently. More than one million iPhones are smuggled into the country and are sold in the black market every year. Clearly Chinese users have already shown great interest in using iPhone. If Apple does not make the same pricing mistake it made in India, the official introduction of iPhone by Apple and China Unicom can be exactly what Chinese users have been craving for.

Speaking of pricing, many Chinese media and users have been criticising China Unicom’s calling rate plans will just not work out. One of the major reasons is that most people who can actually afford the relatively expensive iPhone are using China Mobile—the biggest Chinese telecom company. China Unicom’s users are mostly younger people with lower allowance. Furthermore, users think the handsets introduced this time are crippled without WiFi, which was not allowed under Chinese governmental policy when Apple and China Unicom sealed the deal. Many Chinese users feel like they are “second-class users” to Apple when their iPhones are lack of such important function. On the contrary, iPhones sold in the black market not only keep WiFi, but are also more than a thousand yuans cheaper. For example, China Unicom is selling iPhone 3G 8GB for 4999 RMB (around US$732); while the black market price is only 3600 RMB (around US$527).

However, China Unicom claimed the subsidised price will be cheaper and even affordable for students if users sign a two-year subscription contract with the company. Users can receive an iPhone for free by choosing one of the two-year subscription agreements. The problem is to receive a free iPhone, a user has to pay 586 RMB (around US$86)every month, which is a far more expensive price than most ordinary users in China would like to pay.

Clearly it is unwise to assume iPhone can be popular everywhere. The journey of introducing iPhone to the biggest mobile market in the world will be rugged and rough and will require a lot more effort from Apple and China Unicom.

Here’s a news clip about the launch of iPhone in China.

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China’s Internet Censorship Nightmare

Whenever Internet censorship is mentioned, the first country many people think of probably is China. Perhaps most Chinese people would feel mortified and helpless when it comes to the Great Firewall that is filtering everything online.
Four years ago, when western people talked about the strict Internet control in China, some Chinese would just shrug, because the situation was actually not as bad as western media exaggerated. Chinese users living in China mainland could still browse most of the foreign websites. Now, in 2009, the situation has completely changed: some Chinese popular literature websites have to close up regularly to avoid trouble; many websites either close up certain sections or invent some creative ways for users to register (so that it will be difficult for the Internet police to register); service providers have to stay alert all the time—once your users post something the government doesn’t like, you are dead! But even so, most users could still endure all mentioned above. The thing that really upset a huge number of people was that Google was asked to stop linking to all foreign websites—Chinese users cannot even see a snapshot of foreign web pages. At the era of web 2.0, when knowledge is supposed to be shared by the entire humankind, the Chinese government has deprived its people of the right of seeing the rest of the world.
It’s difficult to believe such thing happens in a society where around 300 million people are using the Internet. The question everyone would want to ask is why? The Chinese government said they have justifiable reasons. Chinese Central TV and related administrations accused Google of disseminating obscene information that are harmful to the harmonisation of the Chinese society. On Sina.com (the biggest Chinese news portal), 1256 people replied to an article saying Google is “fooling Chinese people and the government”, but only 40 feedbacks can be displayed—of course all the 40 feedbacks are supporting the argument of that article. Any one who has read the article would wonder if it was the same person—an Internet police perhaps—who wrote all those feedbacks.
Ordinary Internet users in China would definitely choose to enjoy the borderless information sharing. Who wants to be constantly constrained and monitored anyway? But unfortunately, the Chinese government choose not only to block the rest of the world out, but also to silence alternative views from its own people.
After the Nation Day on 1 October, the Chinese government promoted new filtering softwares to tighten its Internet control and most anti-filtering softwares became useless. Meanwhile, the US-based IT companies continue to release updated softwares like Freegate to allow users in China to breakthrough the Great Firewall. The technological war between the filtering and the anti-filtering softwares has risen to a higher level. However, when can the Chinese government realise strict internet censorship is driving its dream of building a harmonised society further and further away?

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I wrote these articles for China Digital Times, a bilingual service covering “China’s social and political transition and its emerging role in the world.” They publish news reports as well as opinion pieces. Some of their articles are translated from other Chinese news websites. The website is run by the Berkeley China Internet Project (BCIP) out of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

China Blocked Social Networking Websites


Picture by Xianyunyehe

When the whole world is talking about the benefits brought by social networking technologies, China decides these technologies are bad and subsequently blocks the access to Facebook and Twitter from China mainland. But what’s the big deal about these social networking sites? Does it hurt that much to let Chinese people networking a bit online?
According to Huanqiu Newspaper, the Tibet-independence and Xinjiang-independence supporters who ran the riots earlier this year used Facebook to connect with each other. And Twitter managed to disseminate news about riot in Xinjiang quicker than the Chinese national news services. The Chinese government believed they would lose the control of the situation if they lost the control of information. Then immediately after the riots in Xinjiang, many popular social networking sites were either blocked or closed down.
So, several Facebook groups and tweets contributed to the fact that all netizens living in China mainland are now deprived of the right of using Facebook and Twitter? When we think about it, we can neither blame those social networking sites nor those Tibet-and-Xinjiang-independence supporters—the former simply served as communication tool, and the latter simply used the tool. The real problem here is that the Chinese government adopted an extremely negative attitude towards social networking sites. And the ordinary Chinese netizens became the victims.
In the era of Web 2.0, social networking websites rely on mass-scale online activities. It’s cleverer for a government to fully embrace new online technologies rather than to deny them. First and foremost, the Internet technologies are impossible to be killed unless a government chooses to destruct all the telephone infrastructures. Second, many incidents in the past have proved that the government can generate positive public relations through social networking sites. Take the 2008 presidential contest between Obama and Hillary as example. Both Obama and Hillary had huge number of followers on Twitter, but what made Obama a winner was he was following hundreds of thousands people while Hillary was following no one. This is certainly not the only example of the effective utilisation of social networking for political purpose. The British government has also been clever enough to ask public servants to tweet regularly. If the Chinese government was able to use the same logic, people would probably receive information about the riots from the government first, not from those Xinjiang-independence supporters.
This sort of Internet control is like a vicious cycle. The more you try to control, the more you lose. Now the Chinese netizens are dissatisfied with the tightening censorship—more and more users will start to protest if the online blockage lasts longer. Furthermore, the internet censorship in China has done huge damage to the international image of the whole Chinese nation. The Chinese Internet filtering system is dubbed the “Great Firewall”, which probably is one of the worst humiliations that the Great Wall of China has ever had in thousands of years.