Do you shrug your shoulders for a Chinese internet?

This post first appeared in Dutch on Marketing Tribune. Planning to translate my monthly column to English and post it on my blog. Mainly to have content for this blog which is becoming quiet lately (planning to change that, of course). Enjoy!

‘Mei banfa’, two magical words I stumble upon often recently. In English simply meaning ‘nothing to do about’, but in Chinese praised to an often used reaction that makes any problem disappear. Often pronounced while shrugging ones shoulders: ‘Phone broken? Mei Banfa.’, ‘Work overtime? Mei Banfa’. But since recently this expression is also used for something that mainly concerns foreigners in China.

From a million active members to a mere 14 thousand in just four months: Facebook China. The Chinese censors provide no explanation for blocking the biggest western social media sites like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook for months now. Previously websites where often blocked temporarily. The quiet hope that your favorite website would work tomorrow was on the mind of every foreigner in China.

That’s different now. The expectation that tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, your favorite sites work again is getting smaller. The complaints about the Chinese internet censors have changed. Everyone is used to not being able to tweet without some technical gadgets and a small amount of money. A disappointing ‘yes’ on the question of Facebook is still blocked, has changed to a shoulder shrugging ‘mei banfa’.

But now that the great firewall is reluctantly accepted, a much bigger barrier is seeing the light of day.

Last week Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced in its vision on Google in 2015 that ‘Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.’ In that same week the ICANN - the international organization behind domain names - announced that soon domain names can also contain Chinese characters. China has the most internet users, currently well over 100 million more than the U.S. According to Google most content will soon be in Chinese. And if its up to ICANN, this content will be accessible through Chinese domain names.

But not living in China you never stumble upon a Chinese website. The Chinese internet is an internet on itself. This will only increase by the introduction of - for western people - unreadable Chinese domain names. The growth of a Chinese language internet marks an end to the domination of an American ‘World Wide Web’. English focused internet users will have no clue what’s happening on the majority of the internet. A wall arises between the Chinese and the western internet that’s higher than the current great firewall.

China currently shrugs its shoulders for blocking a handful of American websites. But the real barrier are the characters that will soon arise on more websites than the Latin alphabet. ‘Mei banfa?’