Say what you want about whether Twitter can compete in China. Jack Dorsey, creator of the microblogging service, suggests that you can’t make a call on a contender unless you give it a fighting chance.
“The unfortunate fact is, we’re just not allowed to compete in this market, and that’s not up to us to change,” he said Thursday in Hong Kong at AsiaD, a conference hosted by All Things Digital, an online publishing partner of The Wall Street Journal.
Twitter is blocked in China, which has more Internet users than any other nation, and in its place a number of Chinese microblogging services, namely Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, have sprung up and caught fire in its place.
The Chinese services have long been packed with features that Twitter didn’t have initially, leading many users of both platforms and analysts to believe that the homegrown services better serve the Chinese market anyway. But Mr. Dorsey said he believes there are many Chinese users who are hungry to use his global platform.
“At the end of the day, we just can’t compete. [Weibo] can compete in our markets, and we’re certainly interested in what that means for us. I’ve looked at Weibo and it looks fascinating the way that people are using it,” he said. “We would love to have a strong Twitter in China, but we need to be allowed to do that.”
Mr. Dorsey said the change would be up to trade experts in both the U.S. and Chinese governments.
Mr. Dorsey’s comments underscore the appetite among social media companies to connect with China’s many users –who are very active but noticeably isolated — as the rest of the world becomes increasingly connected through global social-neworking platforms. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has also expressed interest in entering the market, but has not yet done so. Facebook is also blocked in China.
Twitter is making headway in other Asian markets, including in the Philippines and India, Mr. Dorsey said. In Japan, he said, Twitter executives noticed that the service wasn’t just popular among people, but among virtual pets, causing a flurry of activity in Japanese from Tamagotchi toys interacting with their owners via Twitter.
But in Hong Kong, a Chinese-language market that is not censored by the government and where Twitter can be accessed freely, many users still choose Chinese microblogging services in order to follow Chinese celebrities.
“We have a lot to learn here in Hong Kong and here in Asia,” Mr. Dorsey said. ”We want to build a service that people can communicate freely on, no matter where they are in the world, no matter what they’re doing with their lives” and which can be used to communicate with the ”entire world and the entire world can engage with them…that’s the most important thing for us to uphold and the most important thing for us to defend.”BEIJING — A toddler who was run over by vans twice and then ignored by passersby on a busy market street died Friday — a week after the accident and after days of bitter soul-searching over declining morality in China.
Two-year-old Wang Yue died shortly after midnight of brain and organ failure, the Guangzhou Military District General Hospital said.
“Her injuries were too severe and the treatment had no effect,” intensive care unit director Su Lei told reporters.
The plight of the child, nicknamed Yueyue, came to symbolize what many Chinese see as a decay in public morals after heady decades of economic growth and rising prosperity.
Gruesome closed-circuit camera video of last Thursday’s accident, aired on television and posted on the Internet, showed Yueyue toddling along the hardware market street in the southern city of Foshan. A van strikes her, slows and then resumes driving, rolling its back right wheel over the child. As she lays with blood pooling, 18 people walk or cycle by and another van strikes her before a scrap picker scoops her up.
Yueyue’s death touched off another round of hand-wringing about society and personal responsibility. Many comments posted to social media sites said “we are all passersby.”
Li Xiangping, a professor of religion at Huadong University, said on a Twitter-like service that it is too easy to blame others.
“What after all prompted such a sad phenomenon? Officials? The rich? Or is it our own cold-heartedness?” Li said on Sina Corp.’s Weibo.
Police have detained the drivers of both vans on suspicion of causing a traffic accident but have not said what formal charges they would face — and if manslaughter could be the charge now that the girl has died.
The people who could be seen on the video passing by the injured Yueyue have recounted being harassed for ignoring her. The respected Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper quoted a man it identified only as Mr. Chen, a hardware merchant, saying that he had been receiving crank calls ever since someone picked him out as the 16th passerby. He said he hadn’t noticed the child.
Some experts said an unwillingness to help others is an outgrowth of urbanization as migrants pour into cities and create neighborhoods of strangers.
“Rapid urbanization not only affects China or Foshan, but anywhere in the world where you have a lot of high-rise buildings, where there is high population density, then the relationship with the neighbors, and with each other is affected,” said Yao Yue, a psychologist and director of telephone help-line for distressed people in Beijing.
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