Perspectives from China: Social Media and Living Well in a Chinese Context

The United States has a current population of approximately 313.9 million people. In 2013, more than 600 million users had active accounted on Qzone, China’s largest social media site (Millward 2013). Although discussions of social media tend to assume American or European users, social media is a worldwide phenomenon, and different locales bring different concerns to bear on social media ethics. China not only leads the world in terms of sheer numbers of users, but also has the most active environment for social media, ranging from instant chat platforms like QQ to blogs, microblogs, social networking sites, and gaming platforms. Chinese users also spend approximately 40 percent of their time online on social media sites (Chiu, Ip, and Silverman 2012_. Given this, inquiries into social media ethics should involve China (and other non-Anglo-European locales and concerns). This chapter is split into two parts: part I draws on distinctly Chinese philosophical conceptions of living well in order to provide a cultural recontextualization of some of the questions associated with social media and ethical development, and to hopefully enrich larger discussions of social media ethics; part II considers the contemporary situation of social media in China, what social media actually looks like in China, and some of the political concerns surrounding social media in China