Martian Terrain

Shenzhen, I am led to believe, was a fishing village 40 yeas ago, plodding along a mere cannon's shot from hustling Hong Kong. Today it heaves with 15 million capitalist souls, charging breathlessly in the exhaust fumes and neon shadows from digital electronics mall to digital electronics mall.

I have never seen so many gizmos in one place. You get the feeling a bright young thing with a spreadsheet and nothing better to do could work out the profitability of each square foot of concrete as a factor of how many escalators you have to scale to get there. Or something.

It's impressive. I'm here with some colleagues from Mumbai who shook their heads, not in the usual Indian gesture of general agreement, but in the more modern Indian way that communicates wordlessly the impossibility of competing with the industrial pumphouse that is China today.

We're here on a mission.

We want to find an Internet cafe to see firsthand how the Chinese youth use the internet. The youth, after all, are who use the internet here. Combine 40 million broadband connections and tens (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of internet cafes, with the one-child policy and the wealthy, coddled youngsters it produces, and you get a phenomenon of internet use not seen anywhere else in the world.

When we eventually found an internet cafe, after at least 20 hesitant English interrogations of non-plussed Chinese bystanders, our eyes were well and truly opened. Out of 150 workstations, about half were in use, but on all of these I saw only two web browsers and one instance of MSN Messenger. Instead of browsing, close to half the people there were actively using QQ, the ubiquitous instant messaging service, with multiple conversations open and their virtual characters fully decked out in all the clothes and handbags and other electronic paraphernalia they can buy for a couple of yuan a piece.

In between chats, and indeed orchestrated through chatting, they were playing a wide variety of online games, from card games and advanced casual games, to MMORPG worlds and chaotic, bloody shoot-em-ups. A couple of loners were watching streaming videos, but many watched while chatting away to their mates on the other side of the cafe, or the other side of China.

So this is what happens when broadband comes to Chinese youths. A fantasy world of games, videos, chatting, dressing up, and chasing girls. Not that surprising, I suppose (I mean, I would have done exactly the same thing at this age, in these circumstances), but startling in its stark difference with other internet markets I am familiar with - India, South Africa and the US.

In fact, you couldn't get two more different worlds than the Chinese and Indian internets. Indian users are older, poorer, more serious, and mainly use email, jobs sites and matrimonial matchups. Chinese internet users are young, wealthy and all they wanna do is play.

Beyond their population sizes and growth rates, India and China seem more and more different from one another the more you look at them. China's ground is paved in concrete and the sky is filled with cranes. India is rundown and chaotic. Yet somehow, somewhere, someone is going to find the nexus of social stress and technological enablement that unleashes a uniquely Indian internet phenomenon upon its citizens.

What will it be, what will it be....?