Lee Kai-fu’s decision to quit his job as head of Google China has been portrayed as a major setback for the company as it struggles to catch up with mainland rival Baidu. Yet his successor’s background and preference for a less-technology heavy approach could play very much in the United States company’s favor. Read article in Asia Times.

CNN’s Cherise Fong did a report about the book.  She summed up pretty well what the book is about. I like the following part the most:

“While 25.5 percent of the Chinese population is now online, CNNIC’s 2008 statistics sketch a relatively coherent portrait of the mainstream majority of them: 67 percent are below the age of 30; 73 percent have only a high school education or lower; 33 percent are students; and 28 percent fall into the lowest income bracket of under $75 per month.

Moreover, 78 percent go online at home and 42 percent log on at an Internet cafe. Once connected, 84 percent listen to music, 75 percent instant-message, 63 percent play online games, and only 57 percent e-mail.

In short, for the vast majority of Chinese, Internet means play, not work.

One could conclude that an Internet entrepreneur’s target audience in China is teenage and twenty-something students, low-end consumers in search of entertainment with plenty of time to kill.”

That applies to Tencent, all the online game players, such as Shanda, Netease, Changyou, The9, Perfect World, and so on, and even Baidu. Read complete article in CNN.

I did an interview with CNN last week about the book.  Here is me talking a bit about China Internet.

In a sudden move, Google China President Lee Kaifu said he would leave the company later this month.

But, industry insiders have been talking about that Lee Kaifu is only the face person for Google China for a long time. The real person in charge is John Liu, the head of sales, Google hired from SK Telecom in 2008.

Lee used to the only one left among the first batch of executives Google hired in China, now, every one of them has gone. This is in fact good for Google, as they are not the right kind anyway – too many of them come from multinational companies, and they are not familiar with local culture.

John Liu understands Chinese users and Chinese business environment better, if he is in charge and if he is also in charge of Google’s R&D direction in China, Google can have a better chance of coming up with popular applications in China – and catch up with Baidu.

Lee’s ideas are similar to Google headquarters’, but they seemed too sophisticate to the ordinary Chinese internet users – who are just young people looking for fun, and friend, online. That’s why Baidu’s MP3 and now Post Bar are magnet to them.

Google, whose Internet search engine has struggled in China to replicate its market dominance elsewhere in the world, is bringing all the firepower it can to overwhelm local rival Baidu in the vast new frontier of Chinese third-generation mobile-phone Internet search.

China didn’t introduce 3G mobile-phone technology until the start of this year, and companies such as Baidu and US-based Google are looking to cash in as the world’s biggest mobile phone market switches to the faster technology. Read the article in Asia Times.

As the last of the 14-part series in Global Times, this week we will try to sum up what are the key differences and how successful Chinese Internet competitors synthesized components from their Western counterparts, all the while innovating to accommodate the unique characteristics of the Chinese market.  Read article in Global Times.