I doubt the author has a first hand experience with the Chinese market:<p>- Typing Chinese with a keyboard isn&#x27;t hard... at all. Pinyin input is about as straightforward and fast as typing in English.<p>- Internet in China isn&#x27;t slow. That is as long as you&#x27;re visiting sites that are hosted in China, which most people in China do. I used to be surprised actually at how good video streaming was when I first arrived in China (back when any film or TV show ever created could be watched for free).<p>There are two main reasons for the look of Chinese websites:<p>1. Chinese visitors have widely different expectations and a radically different culture. You can&#x27;t expect recent trends in Web development to just spread in exactly the same way there. Even then, you can see simple UI and attention to UX are becoming more and more common (e.g. Xiaomi).<p>2. Search is hard to get right. Because of the way the Chinese language is structured, it is surprisingly harder than with Western languages to get right. A simple Porter stemmer gets you pretty far with English. It is an order of magnitude harder to match this level with the Chinese language. This forged behaviors among Internet users, who expect to browse and explore rather than search.