The Facebooks of China

China's fake Facebooks started as mere copycats but now drive innovation in advertising and gaming. They've also built something unique in their country: a place where people can find love, speak out, and be whoever they want to be.

"Know anyone who has any needs? "

"I'm not sure, I can ask around for you."
"Don't you have any needs?"
"I just want to be with someone I love."
"Really, I'm not bad. Give it some thought."

It was the worst pickup attempt that Dong Jin had ever heard. You might think that something was lost in translation, that surely this sounds better in the original Chinese, but you would be wrong. That all this was unfolding online -- Dong, 26, a Beijing teacher, was being approached by a college student who had just friended her on the Chinese social network Renren -- made it even weirder. Scenes like this (many of them, fortunately, less awkward) repeat themselves hundreds, if not thousands, of times a day on the Facebooks of China.

The real Facebook is not available behind the Great Firewall of China, except to netizens rich enough and technologically savvy enough to buy access to proxy servers, because government censors have blocked it as a foreign threat. Twitter and Google are off-limits too.

In the absence of these web titans, dozens of Chinese copycats have sprung up, but none tell a story of evolving, modern China like the fake Facebooks, some of which mimic Facebook down to page architecture and color scheme. The leading social networks on the mainland are Renren, which, like Facebook, initially targeted the college crowd, and Kaixin001 (kaixin means "happy," and the 001 was added to give a techy feel to the name), aimed at young professionals.

In some ways, social networking in China is much like that in the U.S. It has spread well beyond its original target demographic. Office workers stay logged on constantly. Artists, singers, and secretaries post status updates a dozen times a day from their laptops or their cell phones. Grandmothers grow potatoes on local versions of FarmVille.

As with Facebook, the membership rolls are astounding and growing rapidly. In a 1.3 billion-strong nation where less than a third of the populace is online, Renren claims about 165 million users. A slogan on a chalkboard in an employee lounge at its HQ claims, "Every day the number of people joining Renren.com would fill 230 Tiananmen Squares." Kaixin001 says it has 95 million users.

In significant ways, though, online life behind the Great Firewall is different. For one thing, there is no dominant site. By blocking Facebook, the government has unwittingly ignited an especially fierce and litigious competition between Renren and Kaixin001. The two networks have pushed each other strategically and technologically, devising ingenious new ways to advertise to audiences that are even more saturated by marketing than Americans. Also, according to Netpop Research in San Francisco, Chinese Internet users are twice as conversational as American users; in other words, they're twice as likely to post to online forums, chat in chat rooms, or publish blogs. And to the joy of advertisers and marketers, social media is twice as likely to influence Chinese buying decisions as American ones, which explains why brands such as BMW, Estée Lauder, and Lay's have flocked to China's social networks.

Sites like Renren and Kaixin001 are microcosms of today's changing China -- they copy from the West, but then adjust, add, and, yes, even innovate at a world-class level, ultimately creating something unquestionably modern and distinctly Chinese. It would not be too grand to say that these social networks both enable and reflect profound generational changes, especially among Chinese born in the 1980s and 1990s. In a society where the collective has long been emphasized over the individual, first thanks to Confucian values and then because of communism, these sites have created fundamentally new platforms for self-expression. They allow for nonconformity and for opportunities to speak freely that would be unusual, if not impossible, offline. In fact, these platforms might even be the basis for a new culture. "A good culture is about equality, acceptance, and affection," says Han Taiyang, 19, a psychology major at Tsinghua University who uses Renren constantly. "Traditional thinking restrains one's fundamental personality. One must escape."

Put another way, a lot of people in China have needs -- and one of them is a place to be whoever they want to be.

Do not call Wang Xing the Mark Zuckerberg of China. Mark Zuckerberg is the Mark Zuckerberg of China. In 2003, Wang dropped out of a PhD program at the University of Delaware and returned to Beijing to create a local version of Friendster. It flopped. Two years later, he heard about this new thing called Facebook and decided to copy it.

If you want to read more, please click on Fast Company magazine at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/152/the-socialist-networks.html?page=0%2C1