China's young people connect online

Alex Zhang opines on his blog about music and movies and, most recently, learning to drive on Beijing's congested roads.

The 25-year-old sends instant messages to friends on his computer and cell phone, hangs out at social-networking site Xiaonei and downloads American and Chinese movies and television shows from Web sites like Xunlei.

"I would feel uncomfortable if the computer can't connect to the Internet," said Zhang, who earned a master's degree in engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing this spring.

Zhang is representative of China's well-connected youth, for whom the Internet and cell phone have become critical communication tools.

Largely under 25, this cohort of 107 million accounts for nearly half of China's rapidly growing Internet population, according to the China Internet Network Information Center, a government-affiliated agency.

They get their news from blogs and online bulletin boards. And they depend on the Internet for entertainment, downloading and watching American television shows like "Prison Break" and "Ugly Betty."

Raised in the post-Cultural Revolution era, this generation has grown up as China began its economic boom, in a decidedly different environment than their parents.

For the most part, they have no siblings because of China's one-child-per-family policy.

"They are really lonely," said Guo Liang, an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who has studied China's Internet population for almost a decade. "They have no brothers, no sisters. ... They want to have friends."

Xu Xiao Lu, a student at the Beijing Institute of Civil Engineering and Architecture, is one example. The outgoing 20-year-old browses Zhanzuo, a Chinese social network for college students, and finds folks in places she's never traveled. "I want to meet new friends from other cities," she said.

Zhanzuo - the name refers to "grabbing a seat" in the classroom or library - is one of several Chinese social-networking sites and is funded by Morningside Ventures and Sequoia Capital, the Menlo Park venture capital firm that backed Google, YouTube, PayPal and others.

Jack Zhang, Zhanzuo's founder, grew up on China's college campuses where his parents were professors. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from Yale.

He believes social networking has a bigger impact on young Internet users in China than those in the United States. China's youth don't organize around sports or church, he said. The Web and social networks have helped fill that void, offering them a place to congregate and express themselves.

Calling them the Phoenix Generation, Pearl Research estimated that China's 16-to-30-year-olds have $135 billion in spending power.

Underlying the Web's popularity among China's young people, however, is a concern that they are turning into Internet addicts. In a report in April, the China Internet Network Information Center said 30 percent of young Chinese Internet users had a "tendency of network addiction."

It said young Internet users rely too much on the Web to make friends and find entertainment, particularly online games. It encouraged the government, schools and the public to examine Internet addiction more closely.

And if the young people are spending so much time on the Internet, Guo said, when are they studying or working? Their parents, having gone through the Cultural Revolution, want their children to take advantage of privileges they didn't have, such as greater access to higher education.

"The parents strongly expect their child to be somebody in the future," he said.

Video producer aims high

Liu Zetian

Liu Zetian, a shaggy-haired 28-year-old, attracted fans after he starred in and produced a video that spoofed the reality television show "Supergirls," a Chinese version of "American Idol." He parlayed the clip and his videomaking skills into a job as an art design manager at Ku6.com, a Beijing video-sharing Web site.

Liu recalled how, a few years ago, two Chinese college students became famous worldwide after recording themselves, wearing red Houston Rockets basketball jerseys, in their dorm room lip-syncing and swaying to songs by the Backstreet Boys. He had produced several videos by then and decided to take it a step further and start posting them online. "I saw how popular they were, so I decided to make one that's better," he said.

Liu taught himself video editing, lighting and other production skills. He now has fan pages dedicated to him. And he has even bigger aspirations. "I want to go to Hollywood," he said.

source:SFGATE