By Frank Yu
For a country that officially bans Internet pornography and other indecent materials, you can still openly buy strap-on dildos and sex toys in the various sex shops littering the urban sprawl of China. However try to find porn magazines or sex DVDs, even in shops stocked with every pirated movie under the sun, and you face a daunting task. This apparent incongruence is less about hypocrisy and more about the framing of the intended users for each service.
From my interpretation of these events, pornography and erotic literature represent both a corrupting influence on youth and a vice consumed by the more degenerate elements of Chinese society–drug addicts, perverts and foreigners (sarcasm, mind you). While dildos, vibrators and lotions represent marital aids for married couples to enhance and strengthen their bonds and to provide a healthy natural alternative from undermining influences like American reality TV shows and foreigners. Although in the West many people tend to lump both sex toys and porn magazines into categories for sleazy degenerates, Chinese perception of sex toys places them closer to mundane items such as condoms and Viagra, rather than to trench-coated perverts and bukkake videos.
That brings us to the Chinese mobile and Internet statistics that are published every year. The relationship between these two topics of sex toys and Internet stats is closer than you can imagine.
Almost every report for mobile and Internet stats goes like this: "Chinese mobile/Internet now at X million users and will be the #1 mobile/internet market by (200X). China is growing fast at xx% every year."
Although I do not dispute the rising trend, I have reservations about the exact numbers. On mobile statistics we may tend to double-count the users and on Internet population we may tend to undercount the true number. Without digging deep into the methodology of the data collection and analyses, which I believe counts subscribers and not actual users, each market may have a skew towards one tendency because of this. Like the sex toys and porn example, let us look at the framework of the users to see why they have this propensity towards one statistical drift.
According to the International Telecommunications Union numbers of December 2004, China has 310 million mobile subscribers in China.
For most places, counting the number of subscribers would be an accurate count of population. However in China, the popularity and ease of prepaid mobile cards means that users in China may have more than one mobile phone and phone numbers for the following reasons:
Ease of setup and installation: Getting a prepaid mobile account in China is easy and relatively cheap. Almost any newsstand can sell you a phone number and refill card for mobile service. Installation takes 5 minutes. Even if a user gets a new number, their old number is not just disconnected until its expiration date many months later from lack of refills.
Functionality and rates: People may have multiple phone numbers for various functions. I myself have 5 but carry two at any time. My standard China Mobile number cannot SMS or receive SMS from outside China but it can make overseas calls. My China mZone mobile number can send and receive SMS from outside China but it cannot make a direct call outside of China. Neither service can roam outside of China. My case may be extreme but I've met many people carrying multiple phones due to either functionality or because they receive better rates for some services on the other number. Other reasons may be as superficial as the fact that they were able to purchase a phone number with lucky numbers (we can choose our numbers at time of purchase) but still do not wish to stop using their old number which is known by friends and colleagues.
Privacy and Personal: Some people carry multiple phones for business reasons since one is for work and another for personal use. Unlike a monthly subscriber service, prepaid users do not get an itemized bill to use for reimbursement purposes. Also, there are those who want to segregate calls between work and personal for quality of life reasons. Another more exceptional reason is that some users may want to hide their affairs or infidelities on a phone that their spouse or mates cannot check the log or SMS inbox.
So out of those 310 million "subscribers" of mobile services, I would not be surprised that many of them may be double-counted or abandoned numbers. I do not try to guess if this overcount represents a significant number but I would tend to discount mobile users in China as being slightly ahead of the real number
China's Internet population however is an opposite story. In a recent China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) survey, the current population stands at 94 million.
Due to the difficulty of getting Internet to the home (I still cannot get my home Internet to work), as well as paying for it each month (I need to go to the bank and line up every month to pay for service), I do not have Internet access of my own but use one at work or at one of the many neighborhood Internet cafes near my home. I would tend to think that the Internet population is actually larger for the following reasons:
Shared access points: Schools, PC Cafes and Work access represents how many of us (including myself) get access to e-mail and the world wide web. Although my institution may be listed as an access point, I am not sure if the people here at work are counted as part of the Internet population unless they have a home account. Internet cafes by their very nature means that users may not have a home account which means a large chunk of users may be uncounted.
Home accounts: Even for users at home, the true number may be larger due to sharing and multiple accounts on the same computer at home. Since more than 50% of all of China's Internet users are under 25, youth and transients (like students) represent a potential massive undercounting of actual users.
Overall, given the difficulty of obtaining any data or statistics in China, I would not disregard the estimates of Chinese mobile and Internet populations since they are great indicators of trend and momentum if anything else. Much like the incongruence between porn and sex toys in China, the mobile and Internet markets are linked but the circumstances of the user base and how they apply for it may be quite different.
About the author:
Frank Yu is a Program Manager at Microsoft Research Asia's Advanced Technology Center. A Harvard graduate, Frank has worked in Hong Kong, Singapore and now Beijing for 8 years in the field of technology and banking. Views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not those of Microsoft Corporation. Frank can be contacted at [email protected]
Statistics: Big Figures As We Enter The Year Of The Cock
For a country that officially bans Internet pornography and other indecent materials, you can still openly buy strap-on dildos and sex toys in the various sex shops littering the urban sprawl of China. However try to find porn magazines or sex DVDs, even in shops stocked with every pirated movie under the sun, and you face a daunting task. This apparent incongruence is less about hypocrisy and more about the framing of the intended users for each service.
From my interpretation of these events, pornography and erotic literature represent both a corrupting influence on youth and a vice consumed by the more degenerate elements of Chinese society–drug addicts, perverts and foreigners (sarcasm, mind you). While dildos, vibrators and lotions represent marital aids for married couples to enhance and strengthen their bonds and to provide a healthy natural alternative from undermining influences like American reality TV shows and foreigners. Although in the West many people tend to lump both sex toys and porn magazines into categories for sleazy degenerates, Chinese perception of sex toys places them closer to mundane items such as condoms and Viagra, rather than to trench-coated perverts and bukkake videos.
That brings us to the Chinese mobile and Internet statistics that are published every year. The relationship between these two topics of sex toys and Internet stats is closer than you can imagine.
Almost every report for mobile and Internet stats goes like this: "Chinese mobile/Internet now at X million users and will be the #1 mobile/internet market by (200X). China is growing fast at xx% every year."
Although I do not dispute the rising trend, I have reservations about the exact numbers. On mobile statistics we may tend to double-count the users and on Internet population we may tend to undercount the true number. Without digging deep into the methodology of the data collection and analyses, which I believe counts subscribers and not actual users, each market may have a skew towards one tendency because of this. Like the sex toys and porn example, let us look at the framework of the users to see why they have this propensity towards one statistical drift.
According to the International Telecommunications Union numbers of December 2004, China has 310 million mobile subscribers in China.
For most places, counting the number of subscribers would be an accurate count of population. However in China, the popularity and ease of prepaid mobile cards means that users in China may have more than one mobile phone and phone numbers for the following reasons:
Ease of setup and installation: Getting a prepaid mobile account in China is easy and relatively cheap. Almost any newsstand can sell you a phone number and refill card for mobile service. Installation takes 5 minutes. Even if a user gets a new number, their old number is not just disconnected until its expiration date many months later from lack of refills.
Functionality and rates: People may have multiple phone numbers for various functions. I myself have 5 but carry two at any time. My standard China Mobile number cannot SMS or receive SMS from outside China but it can make overseas calls. My China mZone mobile number can send and receive SMS from outside China but it cannot make a direct call outside of China. Neither service can roam outside of China. My case may be extreme but I've met many people carrying multiple phones due to either functionality or because they receive better rates for some services on the other number. Other reasons may be as superficial as the fact that they were able to purchase a phone number with lucky numbers (we can choose our numbers at time of purchase) but still do not wish to stop using their old number which is known by friends and colleagues.
Privacy and Personal: Some people carry multiple phones for business reasons since one is for work and another for personal use. Unlike a monthly subscriber service, prepaid users do not get an itemized bill to use for reimbursement purposes. Also, there are those who want to segregate calls between work and personal for quality of life reasons. Another more exceptional reason is that some users may want to hide their affairs or infidelities on a phone that their spouse or mates cannot check the log or SMS inbox.
So out of those 310 million "subscribers" of mobile services, I would not be surprised that many of them may be double-counted or abandoned numbers. I do not try to guess if this overcount represents a significant number but I would tend to discount mobile users in China as being slightly ahead of the real number
China's Internet population however is an opposite story. In a recent China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) survey, the current population stands at 94 million.
Due to the difficulty of getting Internet to the home (I still cannot get my home Internet to work), as well as paying for it each month (I need to go to the bank and line up every month to pay for service), I do not have Internet access of my own but use one at work or at one of the many neighborhood Internet cafes near my home. I would tend to think that the Internet population is actually larger for the following reasons:
Shared access points: Schools, PC Cafes and Work access represents how many of us (including myself) get access to e-mail and the world wide web. Although my institution may be listed as an access point, I am not sure if the people here at work are counted as part of the Internet population unless they have a home account. Internet cafes by their very nature means that users may not have a home account which means a large chunk of users may be uncounted.
Home accounts: Even for users at home, the true number may be larger due to sharing and multiple accounts on the same computer at home. Since more than 50% of all of China's Internet users are under 25, youth and transients (like students) represent a potential massive undercounting of actual users.
Overall, given the difficulty of obtaining any data or statistics in China, I would not disregard the estimates of Chinese mobile and Internet populations since they are great indicators of trend and momentum if anything else. Much like the incongruence between porn and sex toys in China, the mobile and Internet markets are linked but the circumstances of the user base and how they apply for it may be quite different.
About the author:
Frank Yu is a Program Manager at Microsoft Research Asia's Advanced Technology Center. A Harvard graduate, Frank has worked in Hong Kong, Singapore and now Beijing for 8 years in the field of technology and banking. Views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not those of Microsoft Corporation. Frank can be contacted at [email protected]
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