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Tech company VK makes Russia's contribution to the Internet with Max to rival WeChat and Whats App. Max has the backing of the Russian government and is a messaging, ecommerce, all aspect platform. Russia learned over the years that its governmental processes could be subverted by apps from overseas. This is also the experience in India where democratic processes can be subverted by apps from overseas. As a result the idea of one internet is not real, internet not of the world, not of the US, not of India, not of China or Russia, but of one company monopoly of Google with a sub monopolist of Meta with its control of Whats App and social media- clearly unacceptable. 

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Tencent's social networking app Weixin has over 300 million users in China. A version WeChat is being marketed in Europe and the U.S.

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Young people in China express their anxiety about the economic situation in China on social media sites Weibo and WeChat. People compare the situation today in China with the situation in Japan after 1987. Young people worry about job security, some car-pool to save on gas, and others reduce expenses to increase savings. Lin Mo runs a financial column offering advice to readers on WeChat online site. In 2015 7.5 million new graduates will come out of Chinese universities, up 3% from 2014. There is a great deal of anxiety for these graduates as new job opportunities will be fewer for those not well connected or having skills in high demand.

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China is rapidly moving away from the use of cash in everyday transactions with the popularity of smartphone payment options using WeChat and Alipay apps.

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Shenzen was a small fishing village in the 1970's. Over four decades its population now exceeds that of Hong Kong. Many companies such as Huawei and Tencent, Ping An Insurance and China Vanke are based in Shenzen.  The protests in Hong Kong are not reflected in the sentiment in Shenzen, says this report from Shenzen, China. About three quarters of a million people cross the dozen border crossings linking the two regional economies. People in Shenzen can watch Hong Kong television yet many prefer to watch mainstream Chinese sources of information such as China CTV, and smartphone app WeChat of Tencent. This report describes Hong Kong's waning cultural and economic influence on China so that most people follow the narrative shown on China Television CCTV.  The protests and situation in Hong Kong are also putting back the effort by China to integrate the whole area into what is seen as a "Greater Bay Area" pulling together nine cities in Guangdong province including Shenzen, Hong Kong and Macau. ...

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Americans are increasingly using messaging apps to post status and photos. In the last quarter of 2018 the users posting status and comments dropped by 10% to 23%, for photos posted it dropped by 10% to 28%. This shift means people are posting less on news feeds and more on privately encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp, and WeChat in China. WeChat also does payments and e-commerce. Facebook is making the change as it shifts away from news feeds that have faced a credibility gap.

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China has seen novel uses of the internet. Pinduoduo is one of them. It brings people together on the internet to socialize and shop together. Purchases are small compared to Alibaba- $324 a year on average. By  bringing people in large numbers it has brought in about 788 million users in 2020.  One of the attractions is an orchard game where people tend to their digital orchards to earn shopping vouchers and prizes such as boxes of mangoes.The founder Mr. Huang studied computer science at the University of Wisconsin- Madison where he met Chen who now runs the company. Huang's first effort as recently as 2015 was to sell lychees and fruit from their sole warehouse in Shanghai on WeChat platform. This failed when the computer systems of the website could not handle the large number of orders. Lychees then rotted at the warehouse. From that first effort he realized the way social and browsing platforms could work with shopping. To build up large number of buyers who could be served advertising he came up with subsidies to buyers that are financed from the advertising. Money from advertising is put back into the subsidies. The buyers get discount on purchases and the browsing social platform builds large number of users in a short time. In this way it has as many users as Alibaba but purchases are small.  As in these types of startups with huge valuations and fast growth no profits were made in 2020. The loss is $1.1 billion in 2020. It has put $13 billion of the ad revenues into subsidizing the products on the site. Investors have given the company $6 billion for an agriculture program to sell fresh food and produce.  The Chinese government sees the company subsidies as having an effect of distorting the market prices. Regulators have fined the company for its practices. The company's working culture has some aspects that come under criticism with deaths of two employees.  This offers a glimpse of China's internet culture. How much of it is real constructive development of the internet is always a question. Is investor capital productively invested is also a question. Like Japan in the late 1980's few questions are asked by investors about productive uses of capital. As growth slows as it did in Japan by 2000 a lot of these questions are likely to come back.   ...