MCLC: inside Chinese urls

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: inside Chinese urls
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Source: New Republic (5/1/14):
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-me
aning-urls

The Secret Messages Inside Chinese URLs: Decoding 4008-517-517.com
BY CHRISTOPHER BEAM

An American friend living in Beijing once said she refused to communicate
with anyone whose email address consisted of a string of numbers, such as
62718298454 at 162.com This made sense to me at the time—why make email
addresses as difficult to remember as phone numbers? But I soon realized
that issuing a blanket ban on number-based communications would mean
cutting off just about every single Chinese person I knew.

In the U.S., you really only have to remember two long numbers, ever: Your
phone number and your Social Security number. In China, you’re constantly
barraged by digits: QQ numbers (QQ is China’s most popular chat service),
email addresses, and even URLs. For example, the massive online retailer
Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check
out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming
websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train
tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.

Why the preference for digits over letters? It mostly has to do with ease
of memorization. To a native English-speaker, remembering a long string of
digits might seem harder than memorizing a word. But that’s if you
understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier to remember than
Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin system that uses
the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the word for
“Internet,” 网络, is spelled wangluo in pinyin). And yes, Arabic numerals
(1-2-3) are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman
alphabet (A-B-C). But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than
letters, especially those who didn’t go to college. To many, “Hotmail.com”
might as well be Cyrillic.

The digits in a domain name usually aren’t random. The Internet company
NetEase uses the web address 163.com—a throwback to the days of dial-up
when Chinese Internet users had to enter 163 to get online. The phone
companies China Telecom and China Unicom simply reappropriated their
well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cn and
10010.cn, respectively.

Digits are even more convenient when you consider that the words for
numbers are homophones for other words. The URL for the massive e-commerce
site Alibaba, for example, is 1688.com, pronounced
“yow-leeyoh-ba-ba”—close enough! Those digits can just as often have
individual meanings. The video sharing site 6.cn works because the word
for “six” is a near-homophone for the word “to stream.” The number five is
pronounced wu, which sounds like wo, which means “I.” The number one is
pronounced yao, which with a different tone means “want.” So the
job-hunting site 51job.com sounds a lot like “I want a job.” Likewise, to
order McDonalds’ delivery online, just go to 4008-517-517.com, the “517”
of which sounds a bit like “I want to eat.” (An English equivalent might
be the old radio jingle, “How many cookies did Andrew eat? Andrew 8-8000.”)

This kind of number-language has become an infinitely malleable shorthand
among Chinese web users: 1 means “want,” 2 means “love,” 4 means “dead” or
“world” or “is,” 5 means “I,” 7 means “wife” or “eat,” 8 means “get rich”
or “not,” and 9 means “long time” or “alcohol.” The numbers 5201314, for
example, mean 我爱你一生一世,or “I will love you forever”; 0748 means “go
die”; 
and 687 means “I’m sorry.” (See here
<http://zhidao.baidu.com/link?url=C0vh0PYAxtAvFvOHVxHJJO85uWhfPpzyOaE5SWEuY
jxn3yz5aMOsvPSiAzfpWDRV-5_v9aG187PVWrZSnidbrq>for more examples.) Chinese
has plenty of other number-based slang, such as erbaiwu, or “250,” which
means “idiot,” or “38,” pronounced sanba, which means “bitch.” And of
course there’s the association of certain numbers with good or bad luck,
and the subsequent demand for addresses and phone numbers with lots of 8s
(“get rich”) and minimal 4s (“die”). Back in 2003, a Chinese airline paid
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3163951.stm> $280,000 for the
phone number 88888888.

Why don’t Chinese web addresses just use Mandarin characters? Because
that’s a pain, too. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN), which sets the rules for web addresses globally, has
periodically hyped the expansion of domain names toinclude non-Latinate
scripts, but Chinese web sites have yet to take full advantage. Some
devices require a special plug-in to type in Chinese URLs, and even then
it takes longer to type or write out characters than toinput a few digits.
Plus, for web sites that want to expand internationally but don’t want to
alienate foreign audiences with unfamiliar characters, numbers are a
decent compromise.

Still, the numbers/letters divide is emblematic of the Internet’s built-in
bias: Even more than two decades after its birth, it’s still a
fundamentally American system. (Sorry, Tim Berners-Lee.) ICANN is an
American non-profit corporation, though the U.S. Recently agreed to hand
it over to a “global multi-stakeholder community” in 2015. ASCII, the
character-encoding scheme that was long used on most web pages, is short
for the “American Standard Code for Information Interchange.” In 2012, the
United States refused to sign an international telecommunications treaty,
supported by both Russia and China, that would shift the Internet away
from its current U.S.-centric form of governance. In other words, the
structure of the Internet is a constant reminder of American digital
hegemony, from WiFi standards toGPS. Even the “.cn” at the end of Chinese
URLs comes from the English word for China, not the Chinese word for
China. You can’t blame other countries for wanting to tell the American
250s to 0748.