I think this has less to do with technology to be honest and more with the size of the 'chattering class' in a lot of Western countries. The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China, or a lot of Asian countries for that matter. I think it's more cultural than technological.
I'm in agreement with one of the other commenters here who pointed out that this is an economic phenomenon if anything. There's a large elite, upper middle learned class that puts a lot of status on being into these kinds of media that you just don't have in many places around the globe.
I still remember a similar discussion when I was in Singapore and I talked to people about what books by Singaporean authors they could recommend, and almost nobody had a recommendation. This always stuck with me because I have no doubt if I had asked this in Iceland or Finland I would have gotten plenty of domestic fiction recommended to me.
> The traditional blogosphere has always been an outlet for a sort of amateur public intellectual that simply isn't that common in China
It may not be common, but China makes up for it with a large population, so there are a lot of amateur public intellectuals in terms of absolute numbers.
And they blog. On Weibo, WeChat, Zhihu, Jianshu, ... Most readers probably come across an article by being subscribers or having someone they know send it to them or because the platform pushed it.
So pretty similar to Western social media. What's missing for the classic blogosphere feel is probably really just the discoverability across platforms.
Every platform wants to trap as many eyeballs and as much content as possible, so in the end they're all siloed off from each other. Responding across silo boundaries does happen, but tends to involve embedded screenshots instead of links, which makes it a bit harder to discover other people writing on the same topic, so each writer ends up as a bit of a silo as well.
I'm in agreement with one of the other commenters here who pointed out that this is an economic phenomenon if anything. There's a large elite, upper middle learned class that puts a lot of status on being into these kinds of media that you just don't have in many places around the globe.
I still remember a similar discussion when I was in Singapore and I talked to people about what books by Singaporean authors they could recommend, and almost nobody had a recommendation. This always stuck with me because I have no doubt if I had asked this in Iceland or Finland I would have gotten plenty of domestic fiction recommended to me.