China Practically Unreachable By Western SMS?

Ainsy writes "A friend of mine recently began a placement as an English pronunciation teacher in China. She has picked up a pay-as-you go sim for use over there, only to discover that China seems to have been almost completely overlooked by international communications agreements, specifically from the UK. A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone. SMS in China is upscaling massively, and is incredibly cheap currently — even 'premium' SMS info services cost 1 Yuan (that's just £0.081 GBP). I'm curious why such a large section of the world market is cut off from the west's wireless communication networks especially with the recent Olympics putting the spotlight on the nation in general. China mobile is the world's largest carrier ranked by subscriber base (415 million) and isn't even the only carrier to operate in China). There are a few websites around from which SMS can be sent to China for a fee but this is of only limited use when on the move. Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"

Comments

because the CCCP doesn't want this:

[circletimessquare]

OMG army dudez machine gunnin college kids in tiananmen sq. pass it on bro BRB

2 much better questions

[catmistake]

SMS is expensive... and a gimmick. There are far better FREE mobile messinging techs out there, but it is still insanely popular.

1) Why do people still use SMS?
2) When will they stop, and stfu already?

Re:Is this for real?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Perhaps a more pragmatic answer would be that China will allow text messages to enter into the country when it's able to monitor and censor every text message....

No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind. It probably doesn't even support languages written in Greek or Cyrillic characters. SMS can created by latin script societies, and like ASCII before it, probably makes the most possible use out of the fairly small latin character set.

Don't underestimate the impact of this problem. Recently, the German government embark on a multi billion euro effort to rewrite decades of government and other offical documents so as to remove the now "archaic" Eszett character and replace it with double "s"es ("ss"). When I studied German, only ten years ago, this character was still on the course. It was actually quite a useful little glyph, given the occurrence of double "s"es in the language.

But it's gone now. The reason is painfully evident. There is no Eszett character on the Qwerty keyboard or in the ASCII character set. The emergence of unicode was not enough to save it. It probably won't be the last casualty.

Things like accents, graves and umlauts will probably suffer the same fate. I remember meeting a young Sweedish office worker about problems with database inputs. Basically, customer names(the customers were also Sweedish) would often be missing umlauts on their "o"'s and the like. It emerged that the office worker inputting the names had no idea how to make an unlauted "o". The guy was a trained typist, from Sweeden, and he didn't know how to type letters of his own language using a Qwerty keyboard on an ASCII based PC. He wasn't alone.

These problems have emerged because computers were developed and are still being developed by english speakers and writers, for english speakers and writers. The computer industry was and is still centered in and on America, and other nations and speakers usually have to work around this. Rampant incompatibilities, lack of hardware support and a lack of resources and interest in the problem have lead to people, and governments, taking the easier option and just modifying their written languages to fit QWERTY and ASCII.

The Irish government in fact already did this for the Irish language as far back as 1948, in a sweeping spelling reform which moved the entire language from Gaelic script to the Latin alphabet. The move was so total that most Irish people (who admittedly don't speak irish very much anyway) do not even know that irish was ever written in anything other than latin script. This is probably a portent for the eventual fate of every other european written language, particularly smaller ones. They will change to fit ASCII/QWERTY, not the other way around.

So in short, no, SMS is not going to change. It's not going to support other characters and languages. Ever. And telephone companies are simply going to expect others to adapt their own written word to existing systems instead. The trouble is, while this may work for european languages, it is NOT going to work for Chinese and related languages. There are literally thousands of Chinese characters, and without them, speakers from different parts of the country will not be able to communicate at all as their spoken languages are in fact mutually unintelligible.

While anglophones are quick to suggest "Just Learn American!", that probably isn't going to work out so smoothly. If the western computer and telecommunications industry expects China to fit into the english/ASCII/QWERTY mould, they are probably going to be disappointed. The reality is that sooner or later, western tech is going to have to fit into the China mould. Otherwise, the Chinese will fill that mold themselves.