are cats or dogs alive today. What made it possible? And so quickly? “Chinese leadership believed in the internet as the basis for a modern society.” First, the government. Chinese leadership believed in the internet as the basis for a modern society. Early evidence of this includes the funding in 1988 of the country’s first email system (via packet-switching), which provided a digital connection among governmental agencies and academic institutions in nine large cities, including Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. In August 1993, Premier Li Peng approved a $3 million expenditure to begin building a national digital network providing access to public economic information; this was known as the Golden Bridge Project. A watershed event occurred in 1994, when China’s internet was connected – over infrastructure provided by Sprint – to the global internet. Over the next several years, Chinese computer scientists and electrical engineers networked among their foreign counterparts, chiefly in the US and Japan, to accelerate the growth of China’s internet. Today, only a small segment of the nation’s population, 20 million rural people, have no broadband access, and efforts are underway to get them connected. At the same time, the government protected the local platforms as they developed; their international rivals were either blocked altogether or severely constrained. Meanwhile the traditional media, largely government-owned, had gaps that the new media have been able decisively to fill. Dull and distrusted, Chinese internet users deserted state-controlled media and turned to each other for new ideas and fresh information: social media filled the gaps. Similarly, gaps in China’s fragmented and creaky offline retail environment allowed sellers quickly to build distribution online at scale. In the West, the predominant view of the Chinese internet is that it is fatally repressed by government censorship. Far from it. The controls that exist have done little to rein in the rampant usage of netizens. The few topics the government bans are of interest only to a minority. This is not to apologize for censorship, but simply to describe the reality – even though I know it is difficult to accept if you have not actually lived or worked in China. Far from feeling like an oppressed population with