December 3, 2007
Cellphone trend on the rise in China
E-mail has become the new snail mail for many Chinese as they turn to the immediacy of text messages on cellphones and instant messages on personal computers.
The most affluent and educated use e-mail, but by and large people here rely much more heavily on the shorter, faster and more conversational methods of electronic communication .
E-mail here is treated with the same disdain as the telephone answering machine, said Guo Liang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "You won't have a direct response; you have to wait," he said.
During the mid-autumn festival, people here exchanged 2 billion short message greetings and well-wishes in a single day.
... As with all other forms of communication in China, the government is watching. Some Chinese say officials expanded censorship over phone messages after the 2003 SARS epidemic, in which millions of text messages were sent alerting people to the virus and exposing a national cover-up.
"Once in a while, you'll get friendly reminders from the public security bureau," Ogilvy & Mather's Kuo said. "You always know what the event is that they're referring to, but they're very elliptical about it, reminding you not to spread rumors."
[via China Post]
Links to related articles on the death of e-mail
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