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The Great Firewall isn’t stopping Chinese netizens from searching for the same things as Western web surfers

The World Cup, Royal Wedding and concubines topped searches on both Baidu and Google, but skr is only big in China

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Stephen Hawking at an event in Cambridge, England in 2016 (left) and Stan Lee at the TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood in 2017. (Pictures: AFP Photo/EPA-EFE)
This article originally appeared on ABACUS
The Great Firewall segregates China’s cyberspace from the rest of the world. Websites like Google and Twitch are blocked in the country; content deemed inappropriate by authorities is heavily censored. But despite the information gap, it turns out that Chinese netizens are curious about many of the same topics and issues as their global counterparts.

This week, both Google and China’s top search engine Baidu revealed the past year’s top queries on their respective platforms. The lists provide a glimpse into what mattered to people inside China versus those outside.

Meet Baidu, China’s homegrown search engine

1. EVERYONE LOVES THE WORLD CUP AND THE ROYAL WEDDING

World Cup fans watched Russia vs Saudi Arabia at a bar in Beijing in June, 2018. (Picture: Reuters)
World Cup fans watched Russia vs Saudi Arabia at a bar in Beijing in June, 2018. (Picture: Reuters)
The World Cup truly brings the world together. The football tournament trended across the globe, including in China, where one streaming platform recorded more than 4.3 billion individual views of Russia 2018 matches. Why the enthusiasm from a country that didn’t have a team in the tournament? It might have stemmed partly from its love of gambling: During the World Cup, half of the top 10 free apps on Apple’s iOS App Store in China were lottery apps, leading to an apparent government crackdown.

China also shared its obsession on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle with the rest of the world. The royal wedding in May topped both Google and Baidu’s rankings.

But it wasn’t just the happy stuff. Disaster was on the minds of people everywhere: Hurricane Florence, which raged through the US East Coast in September, was the second most searched news on Google. Baidu’s list was topped by Typhoon Mangkhut, the mega storm that battered China’s tech manufacturing hub in the same month.

2. CHINA CARES ABOUT THE TRADE WAR, APPLE, AND FACEBOOK

Before joining the Post in 2018, Karen was a writer and associate producer at CNN International, where she contributed to the award-winning Asia flagship show News Stream. She is a graduate of Duke University and University of Hong Kong.
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