A woman passes by the logo of QQ, a penguin, at Tencent's booth during an exhibition in Beijing. A Qing / for China Daily

Online chat has become a major business in china, with millions using the country's premier network

It is 9 am in China, and nearly 80 million users are logged on (登录,dēnglù) to online chat (网上聊天,wǎngshàng liaǎtiān) network QQ, most of them on the Chinese mainland. In smoky Web cafes (网吧,wǎngbā), office blocks and homes across China, millions of Chinese make QQ China's dominant online community.

With its cutesy penguin logo (企鹅标志,qǐ'é biāozhì), QQ is "like MSN and Facebook rolled into one," says Tai Zixue, Chinese Internet researcher and author of The Chinese Internet: Cyberspace and Civil Society.

QQ has grown so spectacularly that it almost resembles a region of China in itself, with a population rivaling most provinces. "It's hard to find anyone in Chinese cities who doesn't use QQ," Tai says.

Like most of the Chinese Internet, QQ was originally based on a foreign model. "QQ started as a copy of America Online's messenger program," Tai says.

QQ was launched in 1999 by Tencent (腾讯,téngxùn), a small company based in Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong province. Tencent's founder, Ma Huateng (马化腾), who goes by the English name Pony Ma, was a recent computing graduate who grew up close to Shenzhen.

QQ's total user base is now more than 700 million. That's higher than China's total online population, estimated to be about 500 million, suggesting that some QQ users have registered several accounts.

Eighty-five percent of instant messaging users in China rely on QQ, with just 14 percent turning to Microsoft's MSN messenger as their main means of staying tuned in, according to the China Internet Network Information Center.

Each user is assigned a unique QQ number, and the fact that Chinese business cards often carry this in place of an email address is testament to the service's ubiquity.

"It's a source of pride for Chinese people, that we have a home-grown site to rival MSN or Facebook," Tai says.

QQ's rise turned Tencent into China's largest Internet company, though its company registration is in the Cayman Islands.

With nearly half of its registered users under 25, QQ is changing the social habits of a generation of Chinese. "There's no question QQ has transformed China's youth culture," Tai says.

A survey carried out by MTV in 2008 found that China was the only Asian country where young people reported having more online than offline friends.

As millions of Chinese youths migrate from the countryside to cities in search of work, they use QQ to keep in touch with old friends and make new ones. QQ's search function made it easier to find friends online, enabling its users to reach out to others who share the same interests. Early versions of QQ were set to accept conversation requests from strangers by default.

"Users are happy to be connected with strangers in a virtual community," researchers at Renmin University wrote in a report.

A variety of factors have made Chinese youth especially willing to engage in social media. Rural-to-urban migration that separates families, loneliness and the monotony of China's mainstream media are all factors, Tai says.

"The popularity of QQ reflects an increasing fragmentation of society," he says.

Beyond chat

By the mid-2000s, QQ had trounced its rivals and established itself as the champion of China's instant messaging market.

The fact that QQ was free to use was a central part of its appeal, but it became a problem for Tencent, which lacked a way of capitalizing on the network's popularity. QQ's development since then has essentially been the story of a search for reliable income streams.

Tencent's first innovation was QQ Zone (QQ空间, QQ kōngjiān), a MySpace inspired site which gave users a customizable Web page for uploading text, photos and music. Today, QQ Zone has more than 150 million active users, uploading an average of 60 million photos every day. Users can pay extra to upgrade their QQ zone with different backgrounds and banners.

Today, more than 80 percent of Tencent's revenue comes from value-added services that users pay for using QQ coins (Q币, bì), QQ's virtual currency. Tencent introduced QQ coins in 2002, and the currency has since become the main driver of China's virtual goods market.

One of the most popular ways for users to spend their QQ coins is to tailor their online identity with Tencent's avatar design service, QQ Show (QQ秀, xiù). Based on Cyworld, a South Korean service that enables users to chat online using self-designed avatars, Tencent designed QQ Show as a place for users to "show their online identity", says Camellia Yang, an analyst at Internet research firm Synegage.

For many teenage users, buying clothes for their avatars is a replacement for buying clothes for themselves.

"The QQ Show concept spread through word of mouth, like viral advertising," Yang says.

QQ Show now offers virtual shopping malls packed with Chinese brands, and even virtual car dealerships, where sports cars can be bought from cartoon car salesmen with immaculately drawn side-partings.

QQ Show's success demonstrates the often intimate relationship Chinese youth have with their online personas. In a 2008 survey, twice as many Chinese Internet users as Americans said that they lead parallel lives online.

More than two-thirds of Chinese surveyed said they felt that they are free to do and say things online that they would not do or say offline, compared with just a third of American respondents.

A social force?

Another QQ innovation over MSN was the "QQ Group" (QQ群,qún), which offered chat users with shared interests a way to stay permanently in touch.

"QQ is fundamentally a group thing," Internet researcher Tai says.

There are now more than 100 million QQ groups, catering to a panoply of social interests, from fans of particular TV shows to astronomy enthusiasts.

A look through the groups on offer also highlights some of the more unique aspects of Chinese society. There are QQ groups for so-called xiaosan (小三), or the mistresses of wealthy businessmen, as well as the wives who discover their husband has a mistress.

Another group caters to women who have found out that their husbands are gay.

"People who use QQ groups are looking for information which isn't available in the mainstream media," Tai says.

The groups give a platform to Chinese subcultures, but do not extend to more political groups. "Very few QQ groups are formed based on political interest," he says.

"If you are starting political conversations on QQ, you are likely to become a loner," Tai adds.

Aging populations

Tencent is still China's largest Internet company, with annual growth reaching as high as 60 percent over the past decade.

But its expansion is slowing, and there is a pervasive feeling that the online goods and games markets may have reached saturation point (饱和点,bǎohédiǎn).

"There is a ceiling on Internet value-added services, so that is giving us a sense of urgency," Tencent founder Ma said last year.

In recent years QQ has faced tougher competition (竞争,jìngzhēng) from new social networking services such as Renren (人人网,rén rén wǎng), which were deliberately modeled on Facebook.

New social networks, such as Tencent's own voice messaging service Weixin (微信), are unlikely to change the situation.

"When Weixin asks if you want to add friends, adding your QQ friends is the first option," Yang says.

Micro-blogging (微博,wēibó) services serve a different function than QQ, Tai says: "Weibo is still fundamentally about sharing information, such as news links and commentary," he says. "But QQ is mainly an entertainment platform."

Reaching the elderly still offers QQ hope for expansion.

"There's definitely been an increase in middle-aged and elderly users of QQ in the last few years," Tai says, explaining that elderly users are turning to QQ to stay in touch with family members.

That raises an enticing prospect for China's virtual goods market: virtual armchairs and false teeth, anyone?

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com

The World of Chinese

(China Daily 01/25/2013 page27)