2017 Shapes Up as Year of the Shared, the Cloud

What do sharing, clouds and “like” have in common?

The three were the most popular terms in China’s online realm this year, reflecting the nation’s recent love affairs with the shared economy, cloud services and the act of “liking” on social networking services, most notably the wildly popular WeChat instant messaging service.

People nominated thousands of characters and words in the year-end online vote sponsored by People.cn, the website People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper. The contest, which drew around 200 million votes, sparked widespread debate on which terms best summarized the year, according to a report from the official Xinhua News Agency.

The Mandarin term for “share” — “xiang” — took first place in the vote for most popular character in the domestic realm for 2017. Shared-economy concepts became all the rage during the year, led by an explosion in shared-bicycle services that attracted billions of dollars in investor cash and left China’s major cities cluttered with millions of loaner two-wheelers.

Popularity of the bikes and the older, shared car-riding services spawned a wide range of copycats in other spaces, with shared umbrellas, basketballs and even sex-doll services making headlines during the year.

The popularity of “cloud,” the second-most popular term, reflects Beijing’s drive to make China a leader in services that let people store data and use software from offsite servers. Many of China’s biggest tech names have piled into cloud services, including internet giants Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., as well as telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.

In the international realm, Chinese selected the characters for “leave,” “nuclear” and “intelligence” as their top three, again reflecting big news stories for the year. The character for “leave,” or “tui” in Mandarin, made headlines throughout the year, as shock waves from the U.K.’s 2016 Brexit vote were followed by U.S. decisions this year to leave global treaties and organizations, including the Paris climate accord and UNESCO. If Chinese didn’t have enough exits from those, they got one more with Catalonia’s October vote for independence from Spain.

“Nuclear” was the second-most popular international term, in a reference to the constant stream of headlines throughout the year surrounding the U.S. standoff with North Korea. “Intelligence” was the third-most popular, a reference to China’s recent love affair with anything involving artificial intelligence, or AI.

Contact reporter Yang Ge (geyang@caixin.com)