TRENDS IN ’S DIGITAL LANDSCAPE

A White Paper for Education Institutions and Organizations 2020

by Sunrise International

David Weeks, Shan Liu, Serena Sun, Flora Wang, Zachary Rosen

September 2020

1 TABLE OF CONTENTS

QUICK TAKEAWAYS AND UPDATES 3

SECTION 1 | INTRODUCTION 4

SECTION 2 | ALL ABOUT WECHAT 6

SECTION 3 | WELCOME TO WEIBO 14

SECTION 4 | DOUYIN ON THE RISE 16

SECTION 5 | BILIBILI, A RESURGENT VIDEO PLATFORM 18

SECTION 6 | TELECONFERENCING A TO Z 19

SECTION 7 | THE INTERNET SEARCH CONTINUES 21

SECTION 8 | THE NEW VIRTUAL REALITY 24

SECTION 9 | POLICY CHANGES 25

SECTION 10 | GENERAL CONTENT UPDATES 27

SECTION 11 | CONCLUSION 29

ABOUT SUNRISE

Sunrise International supports its partners in higher education, secondary schools, private education, and education technology in using Chinese digital platforms to reach students, families, and schools. Each year, we publish white papers in key topics including Chinese education policy updates, K12 international schools, education technology trends, and testing and the gaokao, which you can access on the “Insights” section of our website1. Our annual white paper on trends in China’s digital ecosystem is always our most popular, and we’re pleased to bring you more fresh perspectives on China’s digital landscape.

1 https://sieconnection.com/insight QUICK TAKEAWAYS AND UPDATES

1. Even in China, the pandemic has left a legacy of limited or restricted face-to-face social gatherings, entertainment options, and workplace interactions. This has resulted in a sharp and sustained increase in “screen time” as digital platforms play a greater role in professional, communal, and recreational life. Having a local Chinese website and social media is becoming more and more important for reaching students and users, particularly as internet regulations continue to tighten and limitations remain on trade shows, education conferences, and college fairs. Digital sources of information for overseas study have never mattered more for Chinese students.

2. WeChat continues to grow more sophisticated as the platform’s live streaming and video “channel” tools grow more popular. Wechat has expanded its e-commerce functionalities, and “mini-programs,” or applets inside of the Wechat app, have become mainstream. We explore these trends and review the fundamentals of Wechat.

3. Weibo remains a great opportunity for wide dissemination of content: an active, creative presence is important for reaching prospective students.

4. Short video-based platforms like Douyin (TikTok’s Chinese counterpart app) have taken off and diversified content away from silly dance videos, attracting hundreds of millions of users and radically altering search and media consumption habits.

5. Traditional video sharing platforms have benefitted from pandemic-induced hunger for entertainment and educational content.

6. China’s search market is undergoing transition. Alternate search engines like Shenma and in-app search tools in Wechat and Toutiao are disrupting the dominance of Baidu. As the search landscape fragments, it’s important that your SEO/SEM approach keeps up with the times.

7. Teleconferencing platforms like Zoom are increasingly inaccessible in China. International educators should consider local alternatives for information sessions and meetings.

8. Most Chinese social media platforms have barriers to sharing posts from other social media sites, which can keep users within one company’s social ecosystem - maintaining active accounts on multiple platforms can assure you reach as many potential students as possible.

9. As access to technology companies becomes a major inflection point for tensions between China and the US and its allies, it’s worth brushing up on how government policy may affect your Chinese digital strategy. Informed observers predict that wholesale bans on marketing through Wechat or Douyin are extremely unlikely, and that such policies have little bearing on international marketing efforts by universities or companies.

3

Section 1 - Introduction ,,

“It’s almost as if the Chinese internet is a lagoon as an aside to the greater ocean of the internet. And in that lagoon, there are these swamp monster apps that bear some resemblance to the creatures in the ocean but that mutated in some ways because they evolved in a different kind of environment.”

- The New York Times

China’s internet is a unique ecosystem. China has more people on the web than any other country; its 900 million netizens2 account for 20% of the world’s cyber traffic. China is also home to a complex patchwork of internet controls that limit access to the global internet, often referred to as the Great Firewall. This has enabled and propelled the growth of a Chinese internet that resembles but does not mirror the global internet. Rather than speaking in terms of Wechat as the “Facebook of China” or Weibo as the “ of China,” we treat these platforms as different from their distant Western cousins.

We look at Chinese platforms on their own terms, because in many regards, Chinese social platforms and mobile technologies are more advanced than those abroad. At the center of the Chinese digital world is the smartphone and the mobile user. Because most Chinese people started using the internet on smartphones rather than PCs, Chinese companies have focused on creating advanced mobile-friendly software and smartphone hardware, treating mobile compatibility as absolutely essential. China’s sophisticated “superapps” are the envy of Western technology companies, with an app like Wechat functioning as a social medium, search engine, messaging tool, payment method, and marketplace for e-commerce and professional services, all in one. Particularly in fields like digital payments, live-streaming, e-commerce, and virtual and augmented reality, Chinese companies have led the charge of technological innovation. China’s digital landscape matters not only because of the size of the Chinese market and its appetite for international education resources, but because China’s current digital landscape may resemble a future landscape in the West.

2 https://www.chinainternetwatch.com/statistics/china-internet-users/

4 For those working in education, digital platforms are particularly important for students and families in choosing overseas study destinations and the tools they use to prepare for study overseas. According to a 2018 survey of more than 2,000 Chinese students, 70% of students rely heavily on either local internet search or social media accounts like WeChat and Weibo for important information about education abroad, and 56% reported that a digital online source of information was one of the top 3 ways they learned about study overseas3. A 2019 study of nearly 3,000 students from Chinese Tier 2 and 3 cities revealed that 70% of students carry out their online college search in Chinese rather than English, emphasizing the need for a Chinese language website and Chinese SEO/SEM. These students reported that they rely more on Chinese search engines and official WeChat accounts than on agents, private sector counsellors, or word-of-mouth during their college searches4. COVID-19 has pushed more Chinese students online to learn and plan their academic futures. The pandemic has led to a 27% increase in daily screen time5 as users turn to electronics to study, work, and play amid lockdowns. Travel for student recruitment and business development has drastically decreased, while the resumption of college fairs and conferences remains uncertain. Many agencies have emerged from the pandemic badly bruised, as revenues from test preparation and offline afterschool training have been slow to recover. This trend towards a greater digitization of the college search process is likely to continue in the future given the convenience and “stickiness” of digital platforms: even in a truly post-pandemic world, digital platforms are likely to play a greater role in the search for international education resources.

The shift towards greater digitization may be deeply disruptive. Universities and companies that rely on entrenched relationships with agents and schools may find that these do not translate into a robust digital strategy. As universities and organizations compete for China’s growing but still finite number of internationally-minded students, those with the deepest digital presence in China are best positioned to succeed. This means adapting to new content and user trends on established platforms, staying informed about emerging platforms, and recognizing the need to localize your digital presence.

When we say “localize your digital presence,” many take this to mean translating their social or web text content in Simplified Chinese. This is important, but is only the first step in a long path. China’s “Great Firewall” blocks the flow of information into the country on many foreign social and search platforms; local website registration requirements can render even mundane foreign websites inaccessible or prohibitively slow; modern Chinese culture and the Chinese language lend themselves to different user experience and interface preferences; search engines, social media platforms, and review websites created by Chinese companies outflank Google, Facebook, and Amazon to rule the digital landscape thanks to locally savvy teams, a huge home market, and favorable government policies6.

This white paper builds on our 20187 and 20198 white papers about social media in China for educational institutions, with a broadened focus on social media, search engines, and pandemic-related developments like video conferencing. We examine changes on popular platforms like WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin/TikTok alongside new and newly relevant technologies that schools and companies would do well to look into, like Vkajiang.

3 https://sieconnection.com/insight/2019/3/29/what-do-2365-chinese-hs-students-and-28-counselors- say-at-local-fairs 4 https://sieconnection.com/insight/2020/8/12/more-than-pandas-data-discussion-and-tier-2-and-3-cities 5 https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3091967/scmps-china-internet-report-2020-finds-covid-19-has- accelerated-digitisation 6 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/china-digital-trends-2019-white-paper-download 7 https://sieconnection.com/insight/chinasocialhwhitepaper 8 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/china-digital-trends-2019-white-paper-download

5 Section 2 - All About WeChat Sidebar: A Primer on WeChat for the Uninitiated

WeChat began as a simple messaging tool like Whatsapp, but with better functionalities for local users: easily sending voice messages avoided the cumbersome need to type in Chinese, a galaxy of emojis were tailored to local tastes, and sending map pin locations was easier than sending addresses using unreliable navigation apps. From this foundation, WeChat quickly overtook SMS, foreign messengers, and even phone calls for peer-to-peer communication. As Wechat became ubiquitous, the app rapidly introduced new functions like “moments” for social sharing and eventually an ecosystem of download-free applets called mini-programs. Since 2017, the app’s features have expanded to allow one-tap payments, shopping, hailing rides, scheduling doctor appointments, ordering food, booking travel, and much more. The average person is capable of spending the entire day without leaving the WeChat app, and its payment, leading many to call it a “Superapp”.

WeChat is a giant among social media platforms in China. The lion’s share of smartphone users in China use the app, and Wechat is the only app accessible in China with more than 1 billion monthly active users. 34% of all of China internet traffic comes from Wechat9. Tencent, one of China’s largest companies and WeChat’s owner, continues to invest in the superapp, adding new features and expanding upon old ones. Sunrise offers a recap of what WeChat released last year and what’s new this year.

WeChat by the Numbers

1.2 Billion 115 Billion 77Minutes 45 Billion

Monthly Active USD in Transactions Spent on the App per Messages Sent per Day Users through E-commerce Day by the Average on the App Mini-programs User

20Million 80 % 88 %

Official WeChat of Users Say They Use of Users Use WeChat Accounts are Official WeChat Accounts as Their Primary Work Registered to Get Information Communication 10

A: Mastering Your Personal Account

First and foremost, if your work involves China, you should have a personal WeChat account and treat it with the same consideration as you would a new email address. Your personal WeChat account is useful for keeping in touch with contacts you’ve met in person or connecting with new people through group chats and referrals. You’ll need to connect your account to a mobile phone number, so you should consider whether you want to connect your account to your personal or work mobile number. Connecting to a work number might be better for work-life balance, while connecting to your personal

9 WeChat Impact Report, http://www.caict.ac.cn/kxyj/qwfb/ztbg/201805/P020180529380481819634.pdf 10 Sources: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200707-why-email-loses-out-to-popular-apps-in-china https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/12/china-roundup-wechat-monetization/ https://wechatwiki.com/wechat-resources/wechat-data-insight-trend-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/wechat-statistics/ https://blog.brewinteractive.com/wechat-statistics 6 number will allow you to take your contacts with you to your next job.

It’s a good idea to ask someone when you meet them in a professional setting if they prefer to keep up over email or WeChat. You’ll find that many Chinese people prefer to use WeChat to keep up, while foriegn teachers or short-term business travellers might still prefer email.

Dos and Don’ts for Your Personal WeChat Account

Do: Don’t: 1: Add someone’s WeChat account when you 1: Wait more than a day to reply to messages meet them 2: Write very long messages 2: Follow up with a short message after meeting 3: Post only ads and promotions in your them “Moments” 3: Use the desktop version to easily share files 4: Post unedited Chinese translations 4: Occasionally post pictures or videos on your 5: Post too many ads in group chats “Moments” 5: Stay relevant by participating in relevant group chats

For those who know the basics of WeChat already, Sunrise has a handful of tips for getting the most out of your personal WeChat account as an education professional. Use tags and contact labels to organize your contacts. This makes it easier to manage and sort your contacts, especially since few Chinese users list their English name on their account. Just tap into the profile information of the person you met and add a description that might help you remember them or useful information for the next time you talk. You can also make your own tags and assign them to your contacts that have something in common, for instance their city, their job role, or their industry. If you tag your contacts, then you can easily mass-send a message to people in a city you’re heading to, or all the school principals in your contacts with a big announcement. Second, anyone can share up to fifteen seconds of video in Moments, and the clips will play automatically when scrolled over. Don’t count on the user having sound on though, so make sure your video is subtitled or doesn’t require audio. Third, remember that WeChat automatically optimizes groups of pictures posted into Moments, which can create beautiful collages to draw in users. Fourth, if you’re in a WeChat group and want to notify everyone in the group, you can start your message with “@All”. All group members will get a notice that you mentioned them in the group, so use it sparingly.

Personal accounts are just the beginning on WeChat. Like most social platforms, WeChat has personal accounts and “official accounts” that belong to organizations. Many people use WeChat to get updates and news about the topics they care about, and many use WeChat as a sort of search engine if they’re looking for more information about your institution or organization. This means that your official WeChat account carries almost the same weight as your Chinese website since it’s often a user’s digital first impression of your organization or institution.

B: WeChat Official Accounts

Official WeChat accounts allow you to stay in touch with your students, users, and the broader Chinese community interested in your work. Just like other platforms, official WeChat accounts require good, regularly published content that keeps your school or brand on their minds. Content should be thoughtfully titled to attract attention, without looking like clickbait, and it should be in well-translated, idiomatic Simplified Chinese. WeChat is a more closed social network than Facebook--people can only see your official account posts if they follow your account. “Boosts”

7 and in-platform advertisements on WeChat are relatively expensive and heavily regulated: foreign universities can create accounts, but they cannot run ads inside WeChat. This means that getting traction on WeChat takes time and energy for many universities and schools, since the only followers you’ll get are the ones you earn. Companies have an easier time advertising on WeChat, but restrictions on companies exist as well, so it’s important to know whether your company can run WeChat ads before you decide how much time your account is worth. For those at schools and universities, you should consider your goals with WeChat before deciding what kind of account to register and how active to be on the platform.

WeChat for Non-Profit Schools and Universities

1: Better for a Simple Account with Key Info and 1: Better for a Heavier WeChat Presence Few Posts 2: Large schools 2: Small schools 3: Long history of recruiting in China 3: New to China 4: Medium or large Chinese community 4: Small Chinese community 5: Several Chinese partners 5: Few Chinese partners 6: Willingness to build a following over time 6: Needs immediate recruitment results (keep a 7: Used for a mix of recruitment, ISSS, bare bones WeChat and invest more on other alumni engagement, general admissions platforms) communications 7: Only used for recruitment

The two official accounts relevant for educational institutions and organizations are subscription accounts and service accounts. Both types allow you to create a menu at the bottom of the account that links to different pages with key information like courses of study you offer, your location and community, application information, etc. Both also allow you to configure automatic answers with text, URLs, sounds, or pictures. You can do targeted messaging to subgroups of your followers and send follow up messages within 48 hours of a user interacting with the account. The core activity for you will be publishing posts on your account; both allow you to publish posts that users can see in the app in different ways.

WeChat Official Accounts - Subscription (订阅号) WeChat subscription accounts focus on information, promotion, and public communication about your brand. Sunrise thinks that subscription accounts almost always make more sense for admissions offices that use WeChat to recruit or market to students, and for organizations that have regular updates and stories to share with your followers. Subscription accounts allow you to post a lot of information: you can publish as often as once per day, and you can include 1-6 articles in each post. The first article will appear more prominently than the others in bigger text. Posts from all of a user’s subscription accounts appear in a user’s subscription folder. This type of account is more useful for organizations that want to frequently publish, or for educational institutions where users only “buy” or “enroll” once and value having a large amount of information about the organization. Individuals can create subscription accounts using a Chinese national ID number (although this limits many features, especially access to the WeChat API), while organizations including companies and schools will need a Chinese domestic business license or an Overseas Business License from the Chinese authorities. Because of the complexity of setting up a Chinese entity (and the legal entanglements this can create) for foreign universities and SMEs, many choose to have a third party partner register the account and manage the account on their behalf. The process of registering an official account can be slow and confusing, so working with a local partner can simplify and accelerate the process.

WeChat Official Accounts - Service (服务号) WeChat service accounts come with lots of features that are useful for e-commerce brands and in customer service situations, such as a CRM, e-commerce tools, customer service tools, API integration, iBeacons, Geo-location, URL shortening, multiple QR codes for attribution purposes, and OAUTH2.0. Service accounts allow you to set up WeChat pay and a WeChat store. Posts from service accounts push notifications to a user’s phone, and the message will look the same as if a friend had sent a chat message rather than requiring users to go into a separate subscriptions folder with no notification. However, service

8 accounts have considerable limitations. Posting is limited to once per week. Pushing posts as notifications sounds great at first, but it only takes one bad impression from a post for a user to unfollow a service account whereas users will just skip over a subscription account post they don’t like. Thinking from the user’s perspective, a student or parent may research more than 100 universities or dozens of educational program providers. As students narrow down a school list for their university applications, they may follow dozens of accounts to get updates on testing policies, deadlines, and reasons to apply. If even a few of these accounts are service accounts, the constant notifications begin to feel intrusive, and prospective students rarely have a strong sense of loyalty to one school early on in their search. Imagine getting prospective student newsletters every single day: you would quickly consider unsubscribing to some. For this reason, service accounts tend to have marginally higher engagement with posts, but they quickly lose subscribers over time as students feel more marketing fatigue and counsellors want to keep their Wechat clear of notification spam.

Only organizations can create a subscription account. If you have a local Chinese entity, then it’s best to register the account in your own company’s name. If you do not have a local entity, you can either have a third party register the account for you and manage it by proxy, or you can apply to register the account under your foreign organization or institution’s name. Applications are processed on a case-by-case basis, and the process is remarkably complex and time-consuming. It can involve requests for lots of additional documentation such as articles of incorporation or signatures and the personal ID numbers of the present organization. For a small edtech company, this just means some extra red tape and lots of waiting, but for universities this can be challenging. The formation of your university may have happened in the 19th century or exist as an arm of a government where it’s unclear what would suffice for your articles of incorporation. You may not be able to get a signature from the president of your university or school, much less their open-ended acquiescence to provide sensitive personal details to a Chinese software company.

WeChat Mini-Programs (小程序) There are two other types of WeChat accounts: enterprise accounts, which are more for internal collaboration purposes for China-based companies, and mini-programs, which are applets that exist inside of Wechat. Literally translated as “sub-applications,” they cannot publish or notify users; they instead function as simple, small applets to do fairly simple tasks like order food or hail a car. They require no registration, forms, or downloads; they work from within WeChat and may allow the superapp to take the place of traditional app stores. These applets occasionally make sense for foriegn institutions, but they can be useful for edtech firms.

WeChat mini-programs run the gamut from e-commerce to utilities, mini-games, scheduling tools, and news updates. Private education providers may enjoy creating unique and fun tools for prospective or current students. For universities, Sunrise suggests first creating subscription accounts and then perhaps considering mini-programs since subscription accounts are more powerful publishing tools. For all but the largest universities, mini-programs are “nice to have” but not essential. Larger universities will sometimes use mini-programs to make booking appointments with prospective students simpler or to mirror the content posted on a subscription account (this duplicate posting makes sense because WeChat will generally rank mini-programs at the top of search results).

University of Oregon Miniprogram 9 The WeChat mini-program Sunrise helped to develop for the University of Oregon offers an illuminating example of this11. Sunrise has heard stories of universities hosting admissions applications or entry exams on mini-programs, but this may cause a number of complications, ranging from FERPA compliance to poor user experiences. After all, applying to college on a cell phone is probably unwieldy at best and impulsive at worst. C: WeChat Ads

Over the last several years, WeChat advertising revenue has grown in excess of 200% year-on-year12. While the pandemic has seen economies contract across the globe, people are spending even more time on social media, and WeChat advertising is likely to keep flourishing for the foreseeable future13. Edtech companies are well positioned to take advantage of WeChat advertising, the options for which Sunrise outlines below; Sunrise is happy to help new entrants to the field navigate their options. But while private companies, foreign and otherwise, can advertise on WeChat, international educational institutions, considered “foreign NGOs,” are forbidden to do so. It’s worth noting that advertising on WeChat is heavily regulated, so not all private companies can advertise all products on WeChat (in particular, if you happen to be mentioning things like medical devices, cryptocurrency, or financial products, even in passing, that might get your ad rejected).

WeChat Banner Ads

WeChat banner ads appear at the bottom of articles written by official WeChat accounts. WeChat banner ads direct users to another page with more information, to another official account, or to a mini-program; they usually come with an account name, logo, and headline. Banner ads are designed to drive user behavior, but user engagement can be highly variable. Having eye-catching images and a compelling message will determine the success or failure of your ad, no matter how carefully you target users.

A cost per impressions campaign on WeChat has a minimum entry price of $7,275 with the actual cost per thousand impressions varying based on location, from $3.64 per thousand in Beijing and Shanghai to $2.91 for other first and second tier cities to $2.18 for third tier cities. Cost per click campaigns average about 7 cents per click independent of location.

WeChat Moment Ads WeChat banner ad at the end of an article

WeChat Moments is the analogue of Facebook’s newsfeed, and you can plant ads seamlessly onto the page just like user generated content. Moments is the social part of the app, with users checking for updates several times a day, which makes Moments a fruitful place to reach potential students and users. The content of a WeChat moments ad is similar to that of a banner ad, but, unlike with banner ads, people can tag their friends.

WeChat moment ads woven into the midst of users’ feeds

11 https://sieconnection.com/insight/chinasocialhwhitepaper 12 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/wechat-statistics/ 10 13 https://www.cityam.com/tencent-posts-rise-in-profit-as-pandemic-drives-surge-in-wechat-use/ While all WeChat Moments ad campaigns follow a price per thousand impressions scheme, there are two different forms they can take: a flexibly scheduled model that costs a minimum of $150 per wave and a firmly scheduled model that costs a minimum of $7,250 per day, with the actual cost per thousand impressions varying based on location and media content. Picture ads cost $21.80 per thousand impressions and video ads cost $26.19 per thousand impressions in Shanghai and Beijing, dropping to $14.55 and $17.46 in remaining first tier cities and second tier cities and to $7.28 and $8.23 in third tier cities. Moments ads are also available outside , with a minimum entry price of $7,250 throughout much of East Asia, , and the US and $1,450 throughout much of Europe, Canada, and New Zealand. Cost per thousand impressions with picture or video ads are the same price as in Shanghai and Beijing. When running video ads, it’s important to work with an experienced Chinese team, since these ads are so pricey and since making high-quality videos for a Chinese audience is hard from afar. Remember to be sparse with words and heavy with imagery. You’ll only have a few seconds to make an impression, and users seldom watch video ads with the audio turned on. Also, most wechat ads make up a small window inside of a small phone screen, so you’ll want to make sure that all of the ad’s video content is visible. Be especially wary of tiny subtitles or videos created for other platforms with larger ad window sizes.

WeChat KOL/KOC ads

Other than paying Tencent for more traffic, another approach to campaigns on WeChat is engaging Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs), influencers and micro- influencers with large fan bases that have been especially useful in facilitating the growth of e-commerce on WeChat and across Chinese digital platforms. KOLs tend to have larger followers but are considered less trustworthy than KOCs, who might only have a few hundred or thousand followers but are cheaper to partner with and have more devoted fans. KOL shares can cost tens of thousands of dollars with minimal transparency, weak reporting, and little accountability for advertisers, particularly if you try to contract with them from abroad. For the user’s part, netizens are now fully aware of the business of KOL sharing, and users’ demand for authenticity has led to increasing interest in KOC marketing in 2019 and 2020. KOL/KOC banner ads (also known as two-way-pick or mutual selection banner ads) require Fan Bingbing, famous Chinese actress and model, advertises a beauty product line both parties to agree on the price per click and the range of clicks expected of the campaign.

Even though WeChat KOL/KOC ads are confined to followers, unlike on Weibo and Douyin where they can reach a much wider audience, they can work for some organizations because of the targeted nature of a KOC following and the relative expense of in-platform WeChat ads. And, for education technology companies, getting shared by an education-related KOL or KOC can attract prospective students or users when WeChat’s weaker demographic targeting tools prove insufficient.

Unlike KOL/KOC approaches abroad, there is a special kind of KOL/KOC campaign you can use on WeChat: the group leader

. Most WeChat users are members of large private groups of about 500 users. These can range in topic or theme (群主) from the humorous to the professional. These large groups of highly engaged users offer a novel way of connecting with a target audience: imagine instead of a Parent Teacher Association, there was a massive Whatsapp group of 500 people. Or instead of a regularly kept listserv of high school principals in a given city, there was a massive Facebook group of principals. Each group has a manager, the person who runs or founded the group. These are often community members, but some group managers run multiple groups and are open to hosting an information session for you or even directly sharing a message into your group with a link to your website or your WeChat account. Unlike official KOL marketplaces, these group KOC engagements can be very hard to measure, track, and verify, and most will ask for upfront payment. For this reason, engaging group managers requires deep trust of the individual or working with an advertiser in China willing to undertake responsibility if the KOC runs off with your money!

One WeChat campaign by an educational company worth mentioning is the New Oriental Online Learning Assistant program;

11 New Oriental Online’s user base has skyrocketed during the pandemic, illustrating both the demand for education amongst Chinese students and parents and the efficacy of social media platforms in spreading awareness.

Starting a WeChat Moments or WeChat Banner advertising campaign is built into the application. Both Moments and Banner ads offer flawed but functional targeting based on users’ location, age, gender, what device they’re using, and how they’re accessing the ad. WeChat ads can also target by interests, behavior, and education levels, although these tools are considerably weaker than social ad tools in the West. For this reason, we find that WeChat ads are good fits for brands that have very broad and diverse customer bases; the more narrow your target demographic, the more Sunrise hesitates to suggest WeChat ads. It is also worth remembering when preparing a campaign that the price goes down as one moves from Tier 1 cities to Tier 2 cities to Tier 3 cities, which is worth contemplating when putting together a cost-efficient recruitment strategy. And again, college and universities can’t take out advertisements themselves because they’re considered foreign NGOs by China! D: What’s New On Wechat

While a great deal has happened on WeChat in 2020, there were also quite a few changes through 2018 and 2019. WeChat 7.0, released at the start of 2019 and updated several times since, incorporated a series of user interface updates and new features, from a lighter color palette and simpler icons to voice-to-text capability14.

WeChat added a “Wow” button that would move articles to the “Top Stories” section of a user’s page, making content more widely accessible to friends - this opened WeChat as a platform slightly, letting users more easily see material from accounts they do not follow15. You can think of a “Wow” as falling between a “Like” and a “Share” in terms of how widely the feature spreads content. The late-2018 “Time Capsule” feature works a lot like Snapchat Stories, allowing users to create short videos and post them for a 24 hour period16. The WeChat Heat Map function allows content publishers to see how far into an article users read to determine what material draws people in.

The most noteworthy change to WeChat in 2019, and the one that continues to transform the digital landscape, was the mass adoption of WeChat mini-programs17. Revenue from Wechat mini-programs shot up in 2020 to $115 billion, up 160% from the prior year. With more than 2 million mini-programs across 200 categories, users adoption has followed suit, with daily active users up 45% in 2019. The importance of mini-programs in the Chinese digital landscape is only expected to increase with daily active users passing 450 million in March of 202018. WeChat recently released minishop, a mini-program-based e-commerce shop builder, which is just one example of how WeChat is investing its resources into mini-programs19. Minishop is expected to dramatically increase the amount people buy goods and services on WeChat and threaten the Chinese e-commerce behemoths JD, Alibaba, and Pinduoduo.

14 https://blog.wechat.com/2019/01/18/whats-new-in-wechat-7-0-the-biggest-upgrade-in-four-years/ 15 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/china-digital-trends-2019-white-paper-download 16 https://technode.com/2018/12/24/wechat-update-time-capsule/ 17 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/china-digital-trends-2019-white-paper-download 12 18 https://wechatwiki.com/wechat-resources/wechat-data-insight-trend-statistics/ 19 https://technode.com/2020/07/16/wechat-is-testing-a-new-e-commerce-mini-program-feature/ WeChat Paid Content Publishing

WeChat now allows official accounts to add paywalls, requiring users to pay to read or subscribe20. The popularity of some WeChat influencers and early pay-to-read cases has shown how lucrative this can be.

WeChat Short Video

On WeChat, people can now create Channels or “Video Accounts,” through which they can post sixty second clips that become visible on other users’ WeChat-Discovery-Friends feeds21; WeChat has even begun to support live streaming through branded mini-programs and Tencent Live22. Both of these features push WeChat straight into the middle of the short-video craze that has swept the globe and may threaten Douyin’s dominance.

A WeChat Channels page

WeChat Work Updates

WeChat continues to make more and more features available on WeChat Work, which Chinese companies use to organize large groups of employees. Recent WeChat Work 3.0 updates allow WeChat Work accounts to post to WeChat moments and connect to ordinary users, host group chats of up to 100 people (chats were previously limited to 25 people), and make appointments over the app calendar23.

WeChat Emoji Updates

WeChat has added a few new emojis, the most surprising and chuckle-inducing of which is probably the doge, modeled after the memeified dog that rose to prominence in 201324. The resemblance is uncanny. Sunrise’s personal favorite is the “onlooker,” an emoji of a person giving a side-eye glance while eating a slice of watermelon.

20 https://technode.com/2020/01/15/wechat-rolls-out-paywall-feature-for-official-accounts/ 21 https://wechatwiki.com/wechat-resources/wechat-channels-short-video-feature-complete-guide/ 22 https://www.thedrum.com/news/2020/06/22/will-wechats-live-streaming-update-be-gamechanger 23 https://wechatwiki.com/wechat-resources/wechat-work-entreprise-account-corporate-collaboration-commun ication-tool-guide-tutorial/ 13 24 https://www.thatsmags.com/china/post/30568/wechat-releases-new-emojis-including-a-doge- and-watermelon-eating-one Section 3 - Welcome to Weibo

Weibo is a microblogging social media platform powered by the Chinese tech company Sina and is often compared to Twitter25. Sina launched Weibo in 2009, the same year that China blocked Twitter; by early 2020, Weibo broke 550 million monthly active users, establishing it as the 9th biggest social media platform in the world, over 60% bigger than its tweeting antecedent26. Weibo by the Numbers

550 Million 241 Million Monthly Active Users Daily Active Users

94 % 1.5 Million Rate of Mobile Users Among Monthly Weibo Advertisements Monthly Active Users

Unlike WeChat, Weibo is an open space for both individual and public accounts, those belonging to verified users with a special logo next to their profile picture. Trending topics on Weibo are visible on everyone’s feeds no matter whether they follow a certain account or not, creating a web wide “buzz.” Weibo is driven by content rather than networks, so frequently posting is key to staying relevant. Short blurbs of at most 140 characters (which pack in more meaning in Chinese than in English), short videos, pictures, infographics, and external links are the most common and popular forms of content on Weibo. A new function, Weibo Story, was launched in 2017, likely drawing inspiration from Instagram Stories. Users can easily post a 15-second clip or a photo slideshow to share the happy, the strange, and the hilarious moments of their daily lives27.

Despite minor setbacks in 2020, including a weeklong suspension of Weibo’s Trending Topics feature by the Cyberspace Administration of China28 and a drop in ad revenue reflective of COVID-19 industry trends, Weibo still reported user growth

25 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/china-digital-trends-2019-white-paper-download 26 https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ 27 https://sieconnection.com/insight/chinasocialhwhitepaper 28 https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1005795/authorities-put-7-day-freeze-on-weibos-hot-topics 14 at the beginning of 2020 and plans to maintain its relevance by further investing in video and live-stream29. The company is also jumping onto the Chinese e-commerce bandwagon, a move likely to draw in even more users and profit30.

One of the primary benefits of a Weibo account as compared to a WeChat account, and why it’s an essential toolfor educational institutions trying to market in China, is that it’s really easy for new students to hear about a school or program on Weibo without relying on word of mouth from friends or in person events - this is often the first step in pushing high schoolers and prospective users onto an organization’s WeChat account, where schools and edtech companies can engage with students personally. This engagement seeding is inherently unidirectional - Weibo lets users link to WeChat, a privilege WeChat does not reciprocate. Regardless of whether you’re struggling to get verified on WeChat and or write hot content on Weibo, social in China is much easier with the help of an international partner like Sunrise International. Below are a few tips and tricks for schools and companies advertising on Weibo.

There are several ways a school or company can build a Weibo account that draws attention: Chinese internet users, especially students and other young people, are drawn to photos and video; hashtags can tie a post into a wider conversation across the platform, and tagging bigger accounts can pull users’ eyes from an already popular source; Weibo loves user generated content; you can share a WeChat QR code sending fans to something they might love. The key to Weibo, however, is to post often and to post about what’s happening right now in the world - because the platform is built on content generation and dissemination, staying relevant and prolific is the only definite way to draw students and users.

Similar to WeChat, Weibo allows you to advertise on the platform with a verified account. Verification allows Weibo to screen the content and legality of ads, but they also afford you a way to demonstrate to your audience that your account is the account for your organization or brand. For universities, this can be particularly helpful because there may be multiple accounts under your name. Because Weibo is an older platform that later came back into fashion, there’s a recent chance that there is an old or inactive Weibo account, registered by a club or a student that uses the name of the university. This is particularly the case for Chinese Student and Scholar Association clubs which posted frequently on the platform in the early 2010’s. The best way to convey that your account is the official university or company is to get your account verified so that you stand out from the crowded search results.

It’s considered common to post once per week or more on Weibo. This is a good deal more frequent than Wechat, but remember that Weibo posts are much shorter than Wechat posts. Hashtagging current events and relating how your brand is relevant is helpful, but of course you’ll want to make sure that you have the hashtag correct and that the current events you have in mind are actually news in China.

As you think about Weibo ads, don’t forget our adage at the beginning of the white paper that China’s internet is a lagoon, and that you can’t directly compare Weibo and Twitter! Twitter is full of short “hot takes,” and it’s common to see strings of Tweets put together to convey a longer story through multiple back-to-back posts. This is not common on Weibo. Instead, Weibo is much more picture and video-heavy, and Weibo allows you to integrate 3D photos and videos. Users generally expect you to get your message out in a single post, so use each of your 140 characters thoughtfully.

Weibo ads are cheaper than WeChat ads; even adjusting for bots and lower quality traffic, the cost per impression is a fraction of WeChat’s. And they’re open to universities and have many fewer restrictions than WeChat ads. On the other hand, Weibo ads limit your ability to tell a story, since you’re sharing a picture and a few words of text, so having strong Chinese creative content is key to getting results. Weibo is less jealous about external website links than Wechat is, but you’ll want to make sure than any interest form or lead generation form you use actually works in China and that it loads quickly. Sunrise has heard and documented load times of more than 30 seconds for interest forms hosted on many leading admissions management platforms, and every second you have a user waiting drives up bounce rates and erodes the effectiveness of your ad. Consider instead a locally hosted form service like JS Form or Diaochapai--while you’ll have to manually upload CSV files every few days, this beats wasting your money! Although we covered KOL and KOC campaigns on WeChat, know that they’re very common on Weibo because of Weibo’s more open nature and the tendency for attention to focus on celebrity and influencer accounts.

29 https://kr-asia.com/weibo-reports-record-user-growth-in-q1-targets-livestream-and-video- content-in-2020 30 https://kr-asia.com/weibo-opens-e-commerce-management-tool-to-over-500-million-users

15 Section 4 - Douyin on the Rise

Douyin by the Numbers

800 Million 567 Million 450 Million Official Tiktok Accounts Monthly Active Users Daily Active Users Registered

30 Minutes 550 % 200 % Average User Spent on the Growth Rate of Live Streaming Growth Rate of Live App per Day Channels in Education Streaming in Education

Short video and live streaming is changing the world, from music to education to e-commerce. While apps like Kuaishou and Xigua have gained huge followings in China, with 300 million DAU31 and 50 million DAU32 respectively, Douyin, the Chinese version of ByteDance’s TikTok, has rocketed to digital stardom in the last several years; ByteDance reported that 70% of Chinese social media users use Douyin, which, like its Western alternatives, features short music, dance, and comedy videos. With over 450 million daily active users in China, mostly Gen Z, and hundreds of millions of new downloads in 2019 and 2020, Douyin is the perfect tool for educational institutions and edtech companies trying to attract the interest of students and users in China33, and this has only strengthened during the pandemic34. Influencers selling products on Douyin While Douyin has garnered a lot of attention in recent months for its integrated e-commerce features, whereby users can click links within the short videos themselves and buy what they find within the app, there are several other recent changes that institutions might want to look out for. Sunrise outlines these features and developments below.

31 https://kr-asia.com/the-top-chinese-short-video-apps-in-2020-vying-to-grab-your-attention-with-fast-content 32 https://adchina.io/bytedance-advertising/ 33 https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/ 34 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-25/tiktok-douyin-s-in-app-revenue-surges- tenfold-during-lockdowns

16 A: Citizen Journalism and Serious Search

While the lighthearted tone of much of the material on Douyin has given it an unserious reputation, the last several years have seen the rise of citizen journalism within the app. As one example, Chen Quishi, a human rights lawyer that went missing in February after reporting on COVID-19 in Wuhan, garnered a following of over one and a half million on Douyin in 2019 while posting about a flood in Ganzhou before his account was banned35. Chen Quishi reporting on the situation in Wuhan

The world is likely to see more hard-hitting content on Douyin, especially if ByteDance develops greater integration between Douyin and its other product Toutiao, a news aggregation platform popular amongst younger and more educated Chinese internet users. As the maturity of material on Douyin has increased and short-video content has proliferated, schools and other consequential content publishers have gotten onto the app; colleges and universities have even begun to use Douyin to successfully recruit students36.

B: Douyin Video Search

In late 2019, Douyin released an incredibly exciting new function that could facilitate an entirely new kind of social media marketing: the video search. The feature allows Douyin to provide additional content containing the faces or products presented in a selected video. With this ability, prospective students can follow the trail of a college’s post through the app, with Douyin’s video search tying videos together based on the presence of a logo, an admissions officer, or another relevant symbol of the school.

Douyin’s Video Search in Action C: Douyin and Higher Education

Douyin saw a rise in educational content, primarily for teenagers, in late 2019, and COVID-19 has spurred collaboration between the app and educational institutions. Douyin has helped teachers produce and distribute internet-based material with the launch of “Online Classroom,” which offers free classes to primary and middle schoolers across China in the absence of in-person classes37. Douyin has even partnered with Tsinghua University and Peking University, the two top schools in China, to release classes on the app with hundreds of thousands of attendees38. Douyin Advertisement for University Classes

35 https://qz.com/1798077/wuhan-virus-chinese-citizen-journalist-reports-from-quarantine-zone/ 36 https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201910/15/WS5da5275fa310cf3e3557083f.html 37 http://www.bjreview.com/Nation/202006/t20200621_800210743.html; http://www.woshipm.com/it/3389135.html 38 https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202002/19/WS5e4c7c5ca310128217278887.html

17 Section 5 - Bilibili, a Resurgent Video Platform

Bilibili by the Numbers

172 Million 51 Million 10.9 Million Monthly Active Users Daily Active Users Paid Users

4.9 Million 1.1 Million Monthly Uploaded Videos Daily Video Views

Bilibili, also known as B Site or “B Zhàn” in Chinese, is a video streaming website that has seen usage surge in early 2020, with seventy percent year-over-year growth in the first quarter of 2020 alone39. Often likened to Youtube with a dash of Netflix thrown in, Bilibili is known for vlogging, gaming, anime, live-stream, professional documentary, animated web series, and other products and services; though it began as a haven for young internet users, the website has steadily Bilibili heading and search bar. grown in popularity amongst a wider array of audiences. Many have looked to recent Bilibili e-commerce integrations with the help of Alibaba40 and the rise of influencer marketing on the website; the power of KOL and KOC partnerships to help recruit international students, on Bilibili or anywhere else, cannot be overstated. Other recent Bilibili developments related to education are also worth mentioning.

Studying From Home

Prior to COVID-19, Bilibili had already seen the rise of education influencers who livestream themselves while studying; the company, which reported over 20 million users accessed the website for tutorials and other educational content during 2019, was already investing more and more into educational programming with the beta testing of “Bilibili Class” last October, which offers paid academic and skill based courses41. Earlier this year, Bilibili released a “Studying From Home” feature in partnership with China Education Television and several other schools and universities, catering to a wide swath of the learning landscape including K through 12 schooling, current affairs, and continuing education42; Bilibili has also been made an official, city-sanctioned digital educational platform in Shanghai, where the company was founded43.

A number of interesting use cases exist for education companies and institutions: sharing “demo” classes or lectures from famous professors, cross-posting videos that you use on traditional social platforms, or even launching a video ad campaign inside the platform.

39 https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/18/with-170m-users-bilibili-is-the-nearest-thing-china-has-to-youtube/ 40 https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/12/22/bilibili-cozies-up-to-alibaba-to-expand-its-e-comm.aspx 41 https://www.scmp.com/tech/apps-social/article/3042236/studywithme-how-bilibili-kuaishou-douyin- are-fostering-chinese 42 http://www.woshipm.com/it/3389135.html 43 https://kr-asia.com/bilibili-becomes-an-official-provider-of-online-classes-in-shanghai 18 Section 6 - Teleconferencing A to Z The biggest change businesses and educational institutions have experienced across the globe during the pandemic has been the pivot to teleconferencing. In the West, video-meetings mean Zoom, but there are limits to the app’s efficacy in China; Zoom was temporarily blocked in 201944, the app suspended new free registrations and free user hosting in May of 202045, and the company announced in August that it would stop selling directly in China, instead working through domestic partners in the country46. A great deal of controversy has plagued the teleconferencing app specifically around China, with the U.S. eyeing the company with suspicion over privacy concerns and the Chinese government requesting they suspend activist accounts. And while other Western video conferencing tools may still work in China, there is nothing stopping them from being blocked too. Because the future is so uncertain for these applications, we advise using one of Zoom’s many counterparts growing in popularity within China.

A: Vkaijiang

Vkaijiang is WeChat compatible, and students can access a broadcast simply by clicking a link with no downloads; the application is designed for presenters’ ease of use and tends to work quite well for prospective student information sessions. Because Vkaijiang requires no download, your information session will actually start on time, because no one will need to install new software on a prehistoric desktop or muddle through a time consuming user Vkaijiang. registration. Vkaijiang is the teleconferencing application that Sunrise International Education uses for its summer international recruitment webinars47.

Vkaijiang works well for college recruitment presentations. B: Zhumu

Zhumu bills itself as the next Zoom. In reality, it’s an outright copy of Zoom, down to the color scheme and button layout. It is quite popular in China; starting at a significantly lower price point than Vkaijiang, Zhumu offers a basic account option for free and a pro account for small teams costing less than $20 a month, though neither of these options allow for the mass webinars that could really supercharge an institutions international recruitment push. Zhumu Zhumu logo. also requires registration to an individual cell phone rather than an email, so you’ll need to link your pro account to a cell phone.

44 https://technode.com/2019/09/19/chinas-zoom-users-switch-to-local-version-after-blockage/ 45 https://technode.com/2020/05/15/zoom-suspends-chinese-individuals-users-from-hosting-meetings-due-to-regulatory-demand/ 46 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/08/03/zoom-just-made-a-major-china-move- amid-tiktok-ban-fears/#7db8988a4176 47 https://sieconnection.com/tours#customevents

19 C: Xiaoe Tech

Xiaoe Tech has developed well over the last several years as a videoconferencing platform. While you can use it for information sessions, demos, or teleconferencing, Xiaoe Tech was built with actual classroom teaching in mind and comes with a lot of additional features that add to its usefulness in classroom settings, like managing student assignments48. Xiaoe Tech already offers for-pay online courses, so the platform is well recognized by subscribers or Xiaoe Tech Logo public school students who use Xiaoe49.

D: What’s Tencent Got?

Tencent has come out with multiple video conferencing/broadcasting platforms that could be useful for educational institutions and edtech companies. Tencent Meeting is an audio and video broadcasting feature that, while not designed specifically for education features, has the added benefit of working from within WeChat-mini programs; this coulddo even more to empower outreach within an already well-developed mini-program. Sunrise uses Tencent Meeting in specific situations when Vkaijiang is not an option. Tencent Classroom also offers pre-recorded and broadcast educational programming, but it’s much more of the “Massive Open Online Course” variety as opposed to a traditional educational format - it is not considered an ideal replacement for the classroom setting50.

48 https://new.qq.com/omn/20200128/20200128A03AMN00.html 49 https://www.compasslist.com/insights/xiaoe-tech-capitalizing-on-chinas-pay-for-knowledge-fever 50 https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/105705532

20 Section 7 - The Internet Search Continues

Sunrise knows that a large majority of Chinese high school students turn to the internet when the college search begins51, and Sunrise’s recent high school survey tells us that most of that searching is done in Chinese. But taking advantage of the huge opportunity for recruitment that is Chinese SEO is easier said than done; as of March 2020, China had over 750 million search engine users52 scattered across multiple platforms, most of which Western businesses, schools, and internet users have never heard of. The famous global search engines work poorly or not at all in China because of the Great Firewall, and Google, which makes up 92% of the search engine market worldwide53, had less than 4% of the Chinese search engine market share as of July 202054. Baidu, the biggest player in the Chinese search engine game, has about 70% of search engine market share in China and a little over 80% of the mobile market, and Sougou (16.8% and 8.9%, respectively) is Baidu’s most compelling competitor55. Shenma broke onto the scene several years ago with the support of Alibaba and quickly took a large chunk of the market56, but has since lost much of what it gained. One other Chinese search engine to keep in mind is

Haosou 360, previously known as Qiqi 360. The four cardinal search engines of China.

While many of the pure search engine players are the same, there have been many developments in the last year in the Chinese search engine landscape - indeed, the very nature of Chinese search is changing. If you’re interested in learning more about SEO and SEM in China, make sure to have a look at Sunrise’s short guide to Chinese SEO57 or 2019 White Paper58 which offers a deep dive into SEO/SEM! A: Search or Social?

The distinction between internet search and social media is blurring, with users relying more and more on WeChat’s embedded search feature in lieu of Baidu and other traditional search engines. Tencent, the company that owns WeChat, is leaning into the search potential that already lies within the superapp and made an offer in late July to buy out the search engine Sogou; WeChat already partners with Sogou to process searches within its accounts59 and a buyout has the potential to push WeChat Search into high gear, completely shaking up the market60.

Another exciting development in the search-and-social sphere is the breakout of Toutiao Search, previously the search feature within Byte Dance’s news aggregation platform Jinri Toutiao, into its own standalone app61.

51 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/china-digital-trends-2019-white-paper-download 52 https://www.statista.com/statistics/253457/number-of-search-engine-users-in-china/ 53 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share 54 https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/china/ 55 ibid.; https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/mobile/china 56 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/china-digital-trends-2019-white-paper-download 57 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/10-things-everyone-should-know-about-seo-in-china 58 https://sieconnection.com/insight/2019/6/23/pole-vaulting-over-the-great-firewall-to-directly-reach- users-in-china 59 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BE%AE%E4%BF%A1%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2/14307467 60 https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3095034/tencents-us21-billion-buyout-online-search- service-sogou-could?utm_medium=email&utm_source=mailchimp&utm_campaign=en- lz-tech_wrap&utm_content=20200730&tpcc=enlz-tech_wrap&MCUID=4b35d3b9d5&MCCampaignID=64f964bc89&MCAccountID=3775521f5f542047246d9c827&tc=1 21 61 https://technode.com/2020/02/28/bytedance-ups-baidu-rivalry-with-new-search-app/ Jinri Toutiao, colloquially referred to simply as Toutiao, rose to prominence after its release in 2012 thanks to its fresh, compelling news content that appeals to a wide audience of younger, more educated Chinese people62; most users are between 18 and 35, making Toutiao a great tool to reach potential professional development seekers and graduate students63. With 120 million daily active users and publishing hundreds of thousands of articles every day, Toutiao uses AI to pair people with news stories suited to their interests; the platform is incredibly effective, with the average session lasting 76 minutes and the content putting users into Symbol for Jinri Toutiao a more serious browsing mode64. Toutiao Search responds to queries with internal content (complete with comments by users’ friends), material from other ByteDance applications (like Douyin), and relevant mini-programs and information from elsewhere on the web65. Especially useful for educational institutions and ed tech companies is the fact that ByteDance has a united advertiser backend across its platforms, which allows for budgeting between younger, playful, video-focused Douyin as well as the more professional audience on Toutiao.

As Chinese internet users’ behavior changes and short-video content and public social media accounts take a more prominent role in people’s news and search diets, Baidu will continue to lose search engine market share because, unlike Toutiao and WeChat search, it can’t index this material; mobile users’ greater and greater preference for staying within apps is likely to consolidate social-searching as the search functions on these social media platforms become increasingly sophisticated66. This Search Growth for Junri Toutiao has implications for everything from marketing to recruitment - SEO and outreach by educational institutions and edtech companies need to adopt entirely new forms to take full advantage of the new landscape.

B: Don’t Forget Your ICP

It’s important to remember that even as the Chinese search landscape changes, the fundamentals remain the same for educational institutions and companies that want to actually appear when potential students go searching - having an ICP license is one such necessity. An ICP, or internet content provider license, allows organizations to set up a website hosted in China, which can assure that a school’s material will actually load behind China’s Great Firewall. An ICP is also necessary for pay per click marketing on platforms like Baidu, which will continue to ICP License Process be essential even as WeChat and Toutiao play a bigger role in Chinese search. In order to obtain an ICP, an organization needs a Chinese business license; this can be difficult to get for companies and nearly impossible for universities from outside China, but a domestic business partner can help67. Sunrise offers such services, in addition to offering content localization once you have the website and SEO/SEM once the website is set up.

62 https://pando.com/2020/06/12/rise-tiktok-and-understanding-its-parent-company-bytedance/ 63 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/marketing-on-china-s-most-serious-social-media-platform-toutiao 64 https://www.ycombinator.com/library/3x-hidden-forces-behind-toutiao-china-s-content-king 65 https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/11/bytedance-launches-a-new-search-portal-that-returns-a-mix- of-results-from-the-web-and-its-own-platforms/ 66 https://www.ft.com/content/aff3c012-f184-11e9-ad1e-4367d8281195 67 https://www.sunrisecbs.com/blog/china-digital-trends-2019-white-paper-download

22 C: Zhihu Who?

As Baidu has become less trustworthy in the eyes of Chinese internet users, other knowledge platforms have gained ground amongst those doing serious research or making big decisions. Zhihu, with 220 million registered users68 and often described as Chinese Quora, is one such platform.

Known for its comparatively high quality and expert driven content, Zhihu is created, edited, and organized within its own community of users. Zhihu posts tend to show up at the top of search pages, a pattern likely to be reinforced by the recent release of a wiki-section within Zhihu69, and Zhihu results for educational institutions often rank higher than the official pages for those same institutions. By participating in the conversation on Zhihu and managing Q&A content, schools and companies can increase potential students’ and users’ exposure to their programs and products and drive traffic to official websites, all without paying a dime. However, paid-marketing on Zhihu, including pop-up, banner, and newsfeed ads, is an option with the potential to spur further interest in an educational institution or company.

Zhihu, in all its glory

Organizations can also team up with influencers on Zhihu that are known for their expertise in a specific niche, including education and study abroad - most KOLs on Zhihu are well known for posting articles and other long form content rather than through the standard Q&A feature, which can be a great way to engage savvy high schoolers and graduates that are drawn to in depth and intelligent content. And with an increase in investment into the production and dissemination of video content that began in May of 2020, Zhihu has positioned itself well to take advantage of the new global appetite for high quality video70. Indeed, with the release of a new livestream feature, Zhihu is doing all it can to maintain its prominence in the Q&A world even as the internet landscape transforms at a breakneck pace71.

68 https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/zhihu-statistics-and-facts/ 69 https://kr-asia.com/chinas-quora-zhihu-to-develop-its-own-wikipedia-like-section 70 https://tech.sina.com.cn/roll/2020-05-07/doc-iirczymk0313785.shtml 71 https://technode.com/2019/10/12/qa-platform-zhihu-testing-livestream-feature/

23 Section 8 - The New Virtual Reality

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of virtual reality media across the globe, creating a big bump in an already upward trend that has seen rises nowhere as steep as in China. The deployment of 5G technology in 2019 fostered the development of a gigantic ecosystem of new immersive media content creators as internet infrastructures suddenly had the necessary speeds to support 360 media streaming. We now see virtual reality sewn into the fabric of nearly every platform and augmented reality quickly approaching, with WeChat releasing AR mini-programs last summer.

The college touring process is no exception in this trend towards immersive media; nearly all college visits have migrated online and universities are offering low tech video tours as well as more immersive experiences complete with branded cardboard headsets72.

Campus 360, a powerful new entrant on the virtual college touring landscape.

Campus 36073, a project of Sunrise International Education, is one such platform that connects students to dozens of virtual reality campus tours complete with social media integration, multimedia content, and guided touring capabilities that let students reach out to a school’s admissions officers within the platform itself. We invite you to have a look at our DIY guide to creating a virtual campus tour on a budget, and we encourage you, regardless of whether you represent a school with a campus or a software tool purely on the cloud, to post and share immersive photos on your Chinese social media.

72 https://theconversation.com/virtual-reality-campus-visits-let-students-connect-with-colleges-during- covid-19-137054 73 https://campus360.org/en/

24 Section 9 - Policy Changes

While tightening visa policies and travel limitations implemented shortly after the pandemic are a considerable short-term obstacle for universities at the moment, this section will focus on policy changes relevant to digital platforms, specifically the Trump Administration’s Executive Orders regarding WeChat and Tiktok. We’ve left these at the bottom of this White Paper for three reasons: first, US-China tech friction is of little importance to a Canadian or UK university. Second, news about the Trump administration ages poorly because of the administration’s erratic and vacillating approach to foreign policy. Third, research does not support the notion that the Administration’s Executive Order will necessitate any change in action by US universities and edtech companies conducting marketing inside of China.

What it is:

Two executive orders announcing that rules will be developed to ban transactions between the US and Tencent, relating to Wechat, and Bytedance, relating to TikTok.

What it’s not:

• A ban on using either app.

• A ban on paying agencies to post on your account.

• Targeted towards advertisements inside of China or on the Chinese apps.

The Trump Administration released two Executive Orders in early August of 2020 that ordered US persons or entities not to engage in “transactions” with Tencent and Bytedance relating to WeChat and TikTok, respectively. The vague language, lack of prior warning, and unintended consequences stirred up quite a confusion74. The nebulous nature of the edicts might make it difficult for people to assess what exactly is banned, and the consequences of the policy are yet to be determined - Microsoft and Oracle are both in talks with ByteDance to buy TikTok75.

There are several reasons to expect that these Executive Orders will not be implemented, and even if they were, that there would be no impact on universities or companies using Wechat or Douyin to market in China.

First, the Orders appear to have been hastily drafted. The Wechat Order targets Tencent Holdings Ltd., Shenzhen, China. This entity does not exist76. Tencent Holdings is the name of the listed parent company, while Tencent Technology is the Shenzhen-based company. The Order also states that the Secretary of Commerce will indicate which transactions are forbidden 45 days after each Order’s announcement, the same day that the Order is supposed to be implemented. This would have the effect of giving Tencent and all companies that transact with it 0 days to adapt or comply.

Second, the Orders do not specify which app is being targeted. The order states that transactions to Tencent relating to “WeChat” and to Bytedance relating to “TikTok” are forbidden. “WeChat” refers to the English language version of the “Weixin” application that is widely used in China. WeChat and Weixin are two applications that have similar functionalities but are not the same apps. But “WeChat” is also commonly used as a catch-all term to refer to both WeChat, the English language app, and Weixin, the Chinese language app that is in widespread use in China. The Order provides the pinyin translation of the name Tencent (Tengxun) but does not do so for WeChat, suggesting that the Order may apply only to WeChat but not Weixin. It is unclear if this is intentional or an omission. Moreover, because the text of the executive order invokes security threats involving the data of US persons, it is unclear if the rationale is intended to apply only to WeChat or to both WeChat and Weixin. A similar logic applies for Douyin and TikTok, with the exception that Douyin is the Chinese cousin of TikTok and does not share a common backend; you cannot actually access TikTok from inside China.

There is also reason to expect lengthy court battles from Bytedance, constitutional challenges from NGOs, and of course the possibility of a new administration changing course after the 2020 election; indeed, at the time of publishing the bans have

74 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/business/economy/trump-executive-order-tiktok-wechat.html 75 https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabeltogoh/2020/08/18/oracle-challenges-microsoft-in-a-bid-to-buy -tiktok-in-the-us-report/#26ec9cd47936 76 https://www.ft.com/content/785fb36e-b125-4777-b093-5ab38e208bd8 25 been blocked by US district court judges in California and Washington D.C.

Despite the somewhat ominous sound of these orders, it is important for educational institutions and companies to remember that the executive orders were written with the express concern about the security of the personal data of American citizens and possible risks to having large numbers of Americans communicate over a Chinese platform. In other words, Tencent and Bytedance’s international apps that are used in the US, Wechat and TikTok, are the chief cause of concern, not American organizations marketing their products or programs on a Chinese platform with largely Chinese users. It’s also important to note that, even if somehow the Chinese versions of these apps fall under the often distracted gaze of a second Trump Administration, posting content and using the application’s free functions to spread awareness and to communicate with potential students and users does not constitute “transacting” with Tencent or ByteDance and even a traditional ad campaign does not require any interaction between US companies and Tencent/ByteDance when mediated by a Chinese business partner like Sunrise. Agreements finalized before the release of the executive orders on August 6th are also exempt, meaning that any medium term recruitment or advertising campaigns need not worry about these policy changes until renewal.

TikTok and WeChat, the two apps subject to Trump’s executive order.

Sunrise advises educational institutions and edtech companies to keep in mind that the situation is highly fluid and likely to change in the coming month. Any legal challenges to limitations on WeChat or TikTok may outlast the Trump administration itself, and there is no reason to think that future administrations will be as hostile towards Chinese social media. Independent of the executive orders’ consequences, using WeChat and Douyin to reach Chinese high schoolers and users of educational technology shall remain as vital as ever.

26 Section 10 - General Content Updates

Of course, an overview of the most important apps and some key new technologies is not enough to encompass all the changes that befall a digital landscape as expansive and evershifting as China’s; we’d be remiss not to mention some of the more popular memes and stories from late 2019 and early 2020. A: An App For the Nation

Falling behind on your Marxism trivia? There’s an app for that! The start of 2019 saw the release of “Study the Great Nation” (Xuéxí Qiángguó), an app built by the to teach Chinese citizens about party doctrine, national history, and to solidify support for party secretary and leader of China - the Chinese title of the platform is even a pun on his name. Pressure by the government on millions of students, civil servants, and ordinary citizens to download and study the app, widely considered a 21st century update to ’s “Little Red Book,” has resulted in widespread adoption in a moment of rising nationalism and increasing devotion to Xi Jinping77.

Screenshots of “Study the Great Nation”

The app includes pop quizzes on party slogans78. The popularity of the app is useful for institutions to keep in mind as high school students seeking refuge from the restrictive undergraduate intellectual landscape on the Chinese mainland are drawn to international universities.

B: Memes and Fun Stories

2019 and 2020 have witnessed the birth of numerous memes and fun, compelling stories. The Four Generations challenge had a series of children call out to their parents from offscreen, until a son/daughter, their father/mother, their grandfather/grandmother, and their great-grandfather/great-grandmother all shared the frame together79; the 996.ICU Github campaign criticized Chinese tech companies for working their employees from 9am to 9pm six days a week, a practice detrimental to people’s health80. The 996.ICU logo

77 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/world/asia/china-xi-jinping-study-the-great-nation-app.html 78 https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3043791/why-chinas-crackdown-academic-freedom -will-backfire 79 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7qVSGUwS5U 27 80 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/technology/china-996-jack-ma.html This year saw the formation of the Alliance, a social media solidarity movement between Hong Kong, , and inspired by pro- sentiment and a love of milk tea81; and Wuhan Jiāyóu, a statement of support for the residents and medical workers of Wuhan chanted across the rooftops of the city, went viral82.

A variation on the Milk Tea Alliance meme, whereby the collective support of internet users overwhelms anti-democracy sentiment.

“Wuhan Jiayou,” projected onto buildings in the UAE

Of course, at the speed of the workings of the web, none of these memes are likely to last long, and an ear to the ground is essential to understand what prospective students are tuning into on Chineses social media.

81 https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3088901/milk-tea-alliance-are-young-thais-turning- china-over-hong-kong 82 https://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2020/jan/28/wuhan-jiayou-chants-of-solidarity-spread- across-city-at-epicentre-of-coronavirus-video

28 Section 11 - Conclusion

Navigating the Chinese digital ecosystem can be intimidating, and a well established presence on Western web platforms is no guarantee of success in the Middle Kingdom. Search and social, Bilibili and Weibo, ByteDance and Tencent, many of these terms, apps, and companies may be difficult to keep straight and new arrivals on the scene pop up daily. But, ultimately, the same rules apply no matter what you’re working with -- you need to create Chinese language content on localized Chinese websites, you need to get on all of these platforms and figure out how they work, and you need to keep up with what Chinese students and users are interested in and meet them where they are. Developments may happen fast and players like Douyin and new technologies like VR may seem to appear suddenly, but they’re all a part of discernible, widespread movements towards video and other emerging trends. Be creative, keep your content fresh and relevant, and choose your partners well. Many of these digital tools have grown in importance during the pandemic, but their growth and popularity may be sustained well into the future. Schools and companies should be excited. And whether it’s making it through the bureaucracy, creating compelling Chinese material, or figuring out how to use everything at your disposal, Sunrise International stands ready to support you in your efforts to use technology to grow in China.

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