The whole "Coca-Cola in Chinese is 'bite the wax tadpole'" story is an
urban legend, but
according to ethnographer Tricia Wang, Google has come close to bringing the legend to life in China, quite apart from the current flap over censorship and cybervandalism. The piece is well worth reading in full, but some of the highlights:
- People are generally unsure even as to how to pronounce Google's name in Chinese, much less what characters to type in to get to it.
- Google has been completely out-marketed by Baidu, albeit with help from the Chinese government.
- Google's email-centric model is out of sync with China's instant messaging, cell phone-centric culture.
Wang's work is concerned with low-income internet users. She is well aware that academics in China love Google. Her point is that, in China as elsewhere, that's a narrow segment of the population.
From what I can tell, and Wang offers more data to confirm this, the cell-phone/IM model is the way most people in emerging markets access online. See
this post and
this one for a bit more on Chinese cell phones and the web.
