May 15, 2003

Internet: China's News Junkies Get Their Hits On-line

By Lara Wozniak

Every day, Xiao Yi logs on to his home and work computers in Shanghai and talks on-line with people from places as far- flung as New York, London and Baghdad.

"I am interested in knowing about where they live and what they do," says the 32-year old translator. He reads news on-line and chats with friends. He even met his wife on a Web site, getting to know her first by e-mail, before meeting her in person. Xiao is part of China's new wave of computer-literate, savvy Web travellers expanding their world view via a computer screen, seeking international news and new friends on-line.

China's portals are clamouring to cater to this news-hungry audience. Portals that provide news in China have won new converts over the past year. According to NetEase, its average daily page views exceeded 370 million in March, 2003, compared with 199.2 million average daily page views in the same month a year earlier. And the number of registered members grew in March, 2003 to 114 million from just 53.4 million members a year earlier.

Global news events are a major draw. NetEase says that an additional 21 million viewers and 7 million registered members flocked to its site in March, compared to a month earlier, thanks largely to the Iraq War. Similarly, about 10 million people every day viewed Sohu.com before the Iraq War. During the height of the fighting, the company said viewership increased fivefold. Now, with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, a hot topic, the site says it has a steady draw of about 20 million daily viewers. Sina.com also claims its numbers have spiked recently.

Clever marketing helps. The portals have plastered Sars special-issue packages on their sites, proclaiming to have the latest and best information available. The strategy has prompted the likes of Tony Liu, a senior consultant for the Hoffman Agency in Beijing, to begin browsing the Internet daily -- a new habit. "I visit Sina.com every day and see the new figures of Sars patients, government policies and experts' suggestions on how to avoid becoming infected by the virus," says Liu.

Most of the information on these Web pages comes from the official Chinese print media, though there's plenty of uncensored rumour-mongering in China's on-line chatrooms. During the past few months, everything from where Sars cases have occurred to how to prevent and treat the disease have been the source of chatroom chatter.

"Maybe people go there to flirt with some of the more alarming concepts or rumours, only to reassure themselves that they can't be true," says Duncan Clark an analyst at research firm BDA China. Chat rooms, he adds, are "part of the new ecosystem of interactive content, certainly a more tropical part, with fast and wild growing rumours, but it does influence the overall opening up [of the media]."

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