Sci&Tech 2018: World events that mattered to China

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For China's sci-tech community, the year 2018 has surely been remarkable, with various fields like healthcare, space exploration and IT seeing major upgrades.

Major news events from other countries have also left long-lasting impressions on the Chinese people. And here are some of them we at CGTN Digital see as important.

Apple got really rich

The latest iPhone models /VCG Photo

Apple, the iPhone-maker, became the first company worth more than a trillion U.S. dollars on the stock market.

But in China, Apple is faced with many problems.

Fewer Chinese people want to upgrade to the latest iPhone model mainly because of the surging price and a lack of localized functions.

Also, a court in China has recently put a ban on iPhone sales, forcing the company to change an animation in the gadget's iOS software.

Huawei's rise also posed a big question mark on Apple's future in the country. Features like domestically made chips, tri-camera solutions, bigger screen size and customized software can help the Chinese firm bite out a big chunk of iPhone's market share.

Apple's image in China used to be of an innovator in gadget tech. But now that image is slowly being replaced by one of a money-grabber.

Facebook scandals

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Though most mainlanders in China don't really use Facebook, they know it's a big thing around the world. And they know things are getting bad.

Facebook's local equivalent, renren.com, has basically failed as a social medium and chose to transform into a live-streaming platform.

China's social media dominator Tencent has switched to a self-made model known as WeChat.

As news on Facebook data leaks came one by one, Chinese people are learning the lessons and starting to protect their privacy.

When Robin Li, founder of China's largest search engine Baidu, claimed "Chinese Internet users would like to trade privacy for convenience" in March, the users hit him with a big wave of bashing.

But it's hard to get away from Baidu now on China's Internet, just like it is to delete your data from Facebook.

GDPR

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The EU's updated privacy regulations have put a lot of web companies in turmoil. The Chinese ones are no exception.

Actually, the digital content of CGTN remained unavailable to EU residents up to Friday. We are still trying to make sure our website and app are in line with the new rules.

But for most regular Chinese people, the GDPR is not easy to understand. When the news broke, a lot of them are still asking "is it a new English word or something?"

Most articles flew around the Chinese Internet about GDPR are explainers trying to give readers a clear and thorough image of what it really is.

Musk's cars and tunnels

Reuters Photo

People in China can pre-order Elon Musk's Tesla Model 3 now on a Chinese-language website. But the cars will only arrive in China next year.

Tesla also met a problem similar to Apple: price. Even the "economy car" Model 3 seems expensive to a lot of families. Domestic data showed sales dropped more than one-third in 2018.

But Musk's other ventures caught Chinese people's attention: SpaceX and Boring Company. Sending a car to Mars seems very romantic and the Loop demo video got millions (if not billions) of views in China.

The death of net neutrality

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It's not only a U.S. thing. Net neutrality set a good example for carriers around the world.

But now it's gone.

Throttling is widely hated among Chinese netizens as live-streaming is so popular.

But the upload speeds of almost all cable internet packages in China are heavily throttled.

Fortunately, the Chinese government does not allow telecommunications companies to rip off people.

A "faster and cheaper" movement has been going on in the country for years. And it's not ending.

"More efforts will be made to give the Chinese people faster and more affordable internet connections," a source in the IT ministry told CGTN.

It's widely speculated that the government will push hard on carriers to allow phone users to freely switch without having to change their number.

This likely means that competition among carriers will get fiercer than ever. And throttling is not a good idea under that much pressure.

It's only a few days away from 2019. We at CGTN Digital are busy preparing for all the big sci-tech news next year. Bear with us and we will bring you more.