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By Ka Yan Hui
First, we found Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao on Facebook. Then, there was the week-long China 2.0 Tour in November. And it looks like China's fascination with dominating the internet is showing no signs of slowing. Last week, the national campaign for the use of the new domain name, ".中国 (China)", finally took off in Beijing.
The domain name will be the first time anyone has challenged the predominant English alphabet-based system. By 2011, most mainstream websites are expected to have something that ends with .中国.
Planned less than a year ago, the “.中国” campaign will transition existing websites smoothly by automatically assigning the new domain to websites with a “.CN” domain. An official from the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) told the People’s Daily News:
...developing the domain name of .中国 is an important means to accelerate the application and popularity of the Internet in China, allow the Internet to better play its role in supporting and advancing the Chinese economy, and spread the excellent culture of the Chinese nation.
It won’t only be us getting used to the new domain name - mainstream browsers and search engines Yahoo and Google have all agreed to recognize .中国. The campaign is part of the all-encompassing international effort to include multiple language scripts in the universal domain name system - and it just so happened to be that China received dibs first. Makes sense to us, considering Mandarin, by most estimates, is still the most popular language in the world.
Just how quickly the use of new the domain name spread? Look to the governmental organizations, traditional online media, and engineering universities, says People’s Daily Online, and you’ll discover that most of them have already hopped on board.
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
post to facebook
how the hell is this supposed to work everywhere else
"Makes sense to us, considering Mandarin, by most estimates, is still the most popular language in the world."
Hubcap said it. The problem is that almost all of those speakers are Chinese living in China. I guess the Chinese English-language websites will retain .cn, but the adoption of Chinese characters in the domain name makes the websites inaccessible to anyone who doesn't know how to use a Chinese input system, including many Chinese nationals (Tibetan, Uighur). The beauty of using the Roman characters is that they are easy to type, so are not disappearing from keyboards in the rest of the world anytime soon. They are also recognised by computers everywhere. Therefore, while this may serve nationalist purposes, it could actually further isolate the Chinese Internet from the rest of the world. This would make it easier to control internally, but would not be a boon for international communication.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of the 。中国 sites will be in Chinese anyway.