China is 1.2 billion plus. Most of them don’t read English. They are fairly fluent in Mandarin or Cantonese or other Chinese dialects. But not English.

Much of the content on the web is in English, and will continue to be so. This is not just content, but other little thins like URL’s or email id’s and the like. So a number of Chinese people, who wanted to use the net, but had no English – had to memorize URL’s – litterally symbol by symbol.

To expect 1.2 billion people to learn English (or Roman) to use the net is sort of far fetched. The easier thing to do would be to convert the net to Mandarin or Cantonese or Devnagiri or what ever. The solution is Sinicization.

Sinicization is the method by which applications are added to the web as it exists now, to allow Chinese users better access use – by providing it in their native language.And suddenly China has 68 million net users. a miniscule number compared to the west – but phenomenal given that until 2-3 years ago hardly any web content existed in Chinese languages.