Before Unicode, China relied on native encodings that allowed each character to occupy just two bytes. When the global internet forced a reluctant switch to UTF-8, that cost rose to three. This essay argues that this 'byte tax' and the Chinese drive to circumvent a western encoding bias was one of the forces that pushed Chinese digital culture away from text and toward the visual, pithy, performance-driven media it now dominates through TikTok and Douyin.
Before Unicode, China relied on native encodings that allowed each character to occupy just two bytes. When the global internet forced a reluctant switch to UTF-8, that cost rose to three. This essay argues that this 'byte tax' and the Chinese drive to circumvent a western encoding bias was one of the forces that pushed Chinese digital culture away from text and toward the visual, pithy, performance-driven media it now dominates through TikTok and Douyin.
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