Many foreign internet giants are blocked, leaving some young Chinese to wonder what those services even are \u2014 and reinforcing Beijing\u2019s ideological control.<\/b>
\nHONG KONG \u2014 Wei Dilong, 18, who lives in the southern Chinese city of Liuzhou, likes basketball, hip-hop music and Hollywood superhero movies. He plans to study chemistry in Canada when he goes to college in 2020.
Mr. Wei is typical of Chinese teenagers in another way, too: He has never heard of Google or Twitter. He once heard of Facebook, though. It is \u201cmaybe like Baidu?\u201d he asked one recent afternoon, referring to China\u2019s dominant search engine.
A generation of Chinese is coming of age with an internet that is distinctively different from the rest of the web. Over the past decade, China has blocked Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, as well as thousands of other foreign websites, including The New York Times and Chinese Wikipedia. A plethora of Chinese websites emerged to serve the same functions \u2014 though they came with a heavy dose of censorship.
Now the implications of growing up with this different internet system are starting to play out. Many young people in China have little idea what Google, Twitter or Facebook are, creating a gulf with the rest of the world. And, accustomed to the homegrown apps and online services, many appear uninterested in knowing what has been censored online, allowing Beijing to build an alternative value system that competes with Western liberal democracy.
These trends are set to spread. China is now exporting its model of a censored internet to other countries, including Vietnam, Tanzania and Ethopia.
Such outcomes are the opposite of what many in the West anticipated would be the effect of the internet. In a 2000 speech, President Bill Clinton argued that the internet\u2019s growth would make China a more open society like the United States. \u201cIn the new century, liberty will spread by cellphone and cable modem,\u201d he said.
For American and other Western internet giants, the hope of getting a piece of the huge China market is increasingly a pipe dream. China\u2019s Communist Party has demonstrated clearly that it will walk down a path of tighter ideological control under President Xi Jinping. In the first half of this year, the internet regulator Cyber Administration of China said it had shut down or revoked the licenses of more than 3,000 websites.
Yet American internet giants are still trying. Google has been working on a censored search engine for China\u2019s smartphone users in case the government lets it in. And last month, Facebook gained approval to open a subsidiary in the eastern province of Zhejiang \u2014 only to see the approval quickly withdrawn.
Even if the Western apps and sites make it into China, they may face apathy from young people.
Two economists from Peking University and Stanford University concluded this year, after an18-month survey, that Chinese college students were indifferent about having access to uncensored, politically sensitive information. They had given nearly 1,000 students at two Beijing universities free tools to bypass censorship, but found that nearly half the students did not use them. Among those who did, almost none spent time browsing foreign news websites that were blocked.
\u201cOur findings suggest that censorship in China is effective not only because the regime makes it difficult to access sensitive information, but also because it fosters an environment in which citizens do not demand such information in the first place,\u201d the scholars wrote.
Zhang Yeqiong, 23, a customer service representative at an e-commerce company in Xinji, a small city a few hours\u2019 drive from Beijing, echoed that sentiment. \u201cI grew up with Baidu, so I\u2019m used to it,\u201d she said.
The attitude is a departure even from those born in China in the 1980s. When that generation was coming of age a decade or so ago, some were rebels. One of the most famous was Han Han, a blogger who questioned the Chinese political system and traditional values. He sold millions of copies of books and has more than 40 million followers on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.
Now there are no Chinese like Mr. Han who are in their teens or 20s. Even Mr. Han, now 35, is no longer his former self. He mainly posts about his businesses on Weibo, which include making films and racecars.
Many young people in China instead consume apps and services like Baidu, the social media service WeChat and the short-video platform Tik Tok. Often, they spout consumerism and nationalism.
In March, when the social media giant Tencent surveyed more than 10,000 users who were born in 2000 or after, nearly eight in 10 said they thought China was either in its best time in history or was becoming a better country each day. Nearly the same percentage said they were very optimistic or quite optimistic about their future.
One who describes herself as patriotic, optimistic and outgoing is Shen Yanan. Ms. Shen, 28, works in the operations department at a real estate website in Baoding, a city of roughly three million people near Beijing. She believes China is a great country and will do her best to make it stronger, she said.
Every evening, she watches one to two hours of South Korean soap operas on her phone. She does not have any news apps on her smartphone because, she said, she is not interested in politics. She has traveled to Japan a few times and has used Google Maps there, but otherwise did not visit any blocked foreign sites.
\u201cThe Chinese apps have got everything,\u201d she said.
Ms. Shen\u2019s friend Chu Junqing, also 28, a human resources representative, said she spent two to three hours watching funny short videos after work on Tik Tok. She reads news sometimes on the news app Jinri Toutiao but found that many countries were embroiled in wars and riots. \u201cChina is so much better,\u201d she said.
Wen Shengjian, 14, wants to become a rapper and idolizes Drake and Kanye West. Shengjian, whose family moved in July from Beijing to Dongying, an oil town in eastern Shandong Province, said he had noticed that American rappers were very vocal about social issues and that some even criticized the president in their music.
That would not work in China, he said, because it is a developing country and needs social stability. That is a line that the Communist Party makes sure that the state media and school textbooks repeat all the time.
Shengjian, who likes playing basketball, said he knew the names of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. He said a friend of his father\u2019s had told him that those websites were blocked because some of their content \u201cwasn\u2019t appropriate for the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics.\u201d
\u201cI don\u2019t need them,\u201d he said.
When young Chinese spend time abroad, many have to learn an entirely different internet ecosystem. That happened to Perry Fang, 23, who moved two years ago from Guangzhou in southern China to study marketing in Sydney, Australia. In Sydney, he learned a whole new set of websites, including Google, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat.
Now when he returns to China to visit his family for holidays, Mr. Fang said, it is hard not to be able to use Google. He has also learned not to check sensitive political news in front of his parents, who have scolded him for doing so.
\u201cThe Chinese apps become useless as soon as you move abroad,\u201d he said. But with Google and others, \u201cwhichever country you go to, you can still use these apps,\u201d he added. \u201cThe return on investment is very high.\u201d<\/p>\n

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