When Wendy Tang, 25 years old, in New York, homesick, it opens on your Smartphone, China's lifeline: Wechat. The App, which the term "short message service" describes only a very limited extent, in the whole world-about 1.2 billion users. Most of them live in China. In the United States approximately five million resident ethnic Chinese to communicate in the people's Republic.
Hendrik Ankenbrand
business correspondent for China, based in Shanghai.
F. A. Z.the longing for The family in Beijing, Wendy Tang seizes quite often. For seven years she studied in the United States, first in journalism at Stony Brook University, she is now enrolled at Brooklyn Law School in New York City, where she writes her doctoral thesis in law.
The parents and the little brother living in China's capital, 11,000 kilometers away. "My mother, I write every day, hundreds of messages on Wechat," says Tang in an interview with F. A. Z. your father sends you "a couple of messages or less", as is your brother.
Monitoring is a open secret
The family has also set up a group chat in Wechat the messages reach all four. "I send my family photos of the food, what I cooked, and pictures of my everyday life here in America," says Tang. Conversely, it receives photos from China, in order to know what's going on in the lives of Others.
That you can write on Wechat short texts or voice messages to send, the App is the ideal means of communication for the foreign student. To make phone calls to each other, the time shift of twelve hours between Beijing and New York, not ideal, says Tang. "It is easier to write in the free time of each, what you want to say."
not Quite as banal as it is, however, not. The Chinese government let the App monitor, there are written content to censor and to control the overseas Chinese this way, and to discipline tests, like the American government explains, is a fact. This has been proven by studies and is also in China an open secret. Who sent on Wechat, a friend, an article in the F. A. Z., the critically engages with the Regime in Beijing, learns of this, under certain circumstances, anything – because the message will be filtered by the censorship of the algorithm, and not the other matters.
Date Of Update: 07 August 2020, 06:20
