Information Technology

In 1987, China sent its first email — a message that read “Crossing the Great Wall to Join the World” — from a lab in Beijing to a research university in Germany. It was not until 1994, though, that China opened a permanent link to the internet and began hosting servers and web pages. There were just over 20 million Chinese internet users in 2000. By 2020, that number had grown to 989 million. Although China tops other countries in the number of internet users (almost three times the number of the United States), its internet penetration rate still has a way to go (only 69% compared with 96% in the U.S.). 

China’s internet is closely monitored by the Cybersecurity Administration of China. But despite trenchant political censorship, China’s internet industry is booming: Companies are innovating beyond the level of their Western peers in everything from communication to ecommerce to finance to consumer retail. Most of China’s biggest internet companies are backed by or controlled by a handful of technology giants: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, JD, Meituan, Pinduoduo, and ByteDance, which are now all under government scrutiny for monopolistic behavior. 

Of those companies, Alibaba and Tencent are omnipresent in almost all Chinese citizens’ lives: Alibaba has long dominated ecommerce, payments, and fintech services, while Tencent’s WeChat started out as a messaging service but has become an unparalleled super-app and the primary way that many Chinese people access the internet.