How the World Got Wired · The Other Internet
The Parallel World
What I have not yet told you is the most fascinating part. China did not just block the foreign internet. It built its own.
Behind the Great Firewall, over the past two decades, a parallel ecosystem of Chinese apps and websites has grown up. Almost every major American internet product has a Chinese equivalent — and many of the Chinese equivalents are, by now, more technically sophisticated than the American versions.
There is WeChat. WeChat is owned by a Chinese company called Tencent. It is, for an American mind, almost impossible to describe, because no American app does anything like it. WeChat started as a messaging app, similar to WhatsApp. Over the years it absorbed, into a single app, the functions of about twenty separate American apps. WeChat is how you message your friends. WeChat is how you pay for things — you scan a code, you tap to confirm, money moves. WeChat is how you book taxis. WeChat is how you order food. WeChat is how you buy plane tickets, send money to relatives, read the news, watch short videos, file government paperwork, see your medical records. Almost every adult in China uses WeChat for hours every day. It is a super app — a single application that swallows up most of digital life. There is nothing quite like it in the West.
There is Alipay, which is the other major payments app, owned by a company called Ant Group, which is related to a giant Chinese e-commerce company called Alibaba. Together, WeChat Pay and Alipay handle most payments in China. People scan QR codes on their phones to buy things from street vendors, restaurants, taxis. Many Chinese cities have, for years, been functionally cashless. American mobile payments — Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, Zelle — are not anywhere near as universal or as smoothly integrated. The Chinese mobile payment system, by most measures, is several years ahead of the American one.
There is Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform that filled the niche Twitter filled in the rest of the world. There is Baidu, the search engine. There is Taobao and Tmall, the giant e-commerce platforms run by Alibaba, where shopping is mixed with live video streams and instant chat with the sellers. There is Bilibili, a video site especially popular with younger Chinese viewers, that mixes YouTube and TikTok in ways neither has tried. There is Pinduoduo, an enormous e-commerce app that combined group-buying with gamification in ways American startups are now trying to copy.
The point is this: the choice China made — to build the Great Firewall, to keep most American apps out, to develop its own ecosystem — produced a fundamentally different internet inside China. It is not a worse internet, by every measure. By some measures (mobile payments, super apps, live commerce), it is actually ahead of the American one. By other measures (free speech, access to outside information, political openness), it is significantly behind. It is, in any case, a different one. The two internets — the American one you have been reading about, and the Chinese one — increasingly look like two separate civilizations.
People who study this have started calling the result the splinternet — a contraction of splinter and internet. The single, open, global network is splintering into multiple regional networks, with different rules in each one.
China is the most dramatic example. But it is not the only one. Russia has been steadily walling off its internet for years, especially since 2022. Iran heavily restricts what its citizens can see. The European Union, although it is democratic and committed to open information, has chosen to regulate the American tech giants much more strictly than the United States does — with laws about privacy, about how user data can be used, about what platforms must do to remove illegal content. Even within democracies, the version of the internet you experience now depends, more and more, on which country you happen to be in.
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