Does Chinese Internet Culture Exist?

This week I attended the inaugural “Chengdu Internet Culture Convention”.

Throughout my time there, meeting people and listening to speeches about the development of Chengdu’s IT infrastructure, I was plagued with a single thought: can Chinese internet culture exist?

In the TED clip above, a Chinese blogger goes into great detail about what the “Chinese internet” entails. Is the formula below accurate?

Chinese internet culture = block each and every international Web 2.0 service, and then clone it for a Chinese audience.

This is something that you will never hear inside China. It takes Chinese people traveling to far-away places like Edinburgh Scotland to make a case such as this, which undermines everything that the Chinese internet claims to be.