Cellphone trend on the rise in China

The 20-year-old from China’s rural Henan Province doesn’t own a computer. He visits the local Internet cafe to check his e-mail every couple of weeks.

That’s not to say Xu is out of touch. He just prefers tapping out text messages to his friends on his Lenovo cellphone — the most expensive piece of electronics gear he owns — over typing an e-mail on a computer keyboard.

“When I communicate with my friends, I use short messages,” Xu said. “I send messages in mornings and afternoons, asking, ‘Do you want to come out to eat?’”

E-mail has become the new snail mail for many Chinese as they turn to the immediacy of text messages on cellphones and instant messages on personal computers. The most affluent and educated use e-mail, but by and large people here rely much more heavily on the shorter, faster and more conversational methods of electronic communication .

E-mail here is treated with the same disdain as the telephone answering machine, said Guo Liang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

“You won’t have a direct response; you have to wait,” he said.

China’s mania for messaging — particularly mobile messaging — is largely a product of how technology developed here. Like other emerging global markets, rural regions of China lacked phones or even a television as recently as two decades ago. The country modernized just as mobile technology was broadly accessible.

China is now the world’s largest mobile phone market.

“When people are stepping up to buy their first phone in their life, why bother with the land line?” said P.T. Black, a partner in Jigsaw International, a consumer lifestyle consulting company based in Shanghai.

China’s 455 million cellphone users chat, cajole, joke and flirt via short messages about 33 billion times a month, according to government statistics and iResearch Consulting Group, a market research company that focuses on Chinese Internet and wireless industries. During the mid-autumn festival, people here exchanged 2 billion short message greetings and well-wishes in a single day.

More people in China get news or weather via the Web on their cellphones than from personal computers, said David Turchetti, chief executive of 21 Communications, a mobile marketing agency based in China.

“Most Chinese people can’t afford a PC for their home. It’s a pretty big investment,” he said. “Your mobile phone — you almost can’t live without it.”

Nearly 70 percent of China’s online population regularly uses instant messaging, compared with only 56 percent for e-mail, according to the government’s China Internet Network Information Center. That’s a stark contrast to the U.S., where the 39 percent of those who use IM are dwarfed by the 91 percent of Internet users who communicate by e-mail.

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