From what I heard, people in mainland use Wechat, which is probably why you haven't heard of LINE. Still, it has 700 million users, started in Japan, and is far and away the most popular in Taiwan (from what I could tell). It looks like wiki says 17 million Taiwanese users, but that's probably higher now, and anecdotally, it seemed that almost every college-aged student I met used LINE daily.
As I mentioned, they do a lot of visible sponsorship/partnerships. You'll see a lot of "LINE contests" attached to juice bottles, running at the bottom of newscasts, etc.
Yeah, I wrote a 15-page paper on this for my "next china" economics class. My thesis was that although the primary purpose of the Great Firewall appears political, with a goal of censorship, in actuality the CCP keeps it around for economic reasons. Effectively, the GFW is a way of subsidizing domestic tech companies. As long as it exists, it keeps foreign competitors at bay while domestic counterparts launch their own services, often in conduit with the CCP censorship authorities.
My prediction was that we will see the GFW come down in a few years, once the "human rights" debate reaches critical mass, but moreso once the userbases of domestic companies reach critical mass. Once the big Chinese tech companies have enough of a head-start on all their US counterparts, and they're ready to expand Westward, the GFW will come down.
China realizes that it has a population of 2 billion, and therefore wields far more raw economic power potential than any other country. Therefore China wants to develop its own domestic tech economy to serve its users in a way that conforms to its culture and benefits the Chinese economy overall. Furthermore, there's no reason that its domestic companies would not eventually branch westward in the same way that US companies are attempting to branch eastward.
We're starting to see the same thing in Russia. Geographic Internet isolation is becoming a common trend and a useful geopolitical powerplay. I suspect we'll see more of it from large countries interested in nurturing their own domestic tech economy.
1.3 billion people. Chinese companies are still in the steal technical ideas and focus on business model innovation phase, so they still need the GFW to survive, and would get slaughtered even in Hong Kong or Taiwan, which are kind of Chinese also. I'm not sure if they'll every break out of it, the perspective here is very local.
Well, a counter example is eBay, Paypal, Amazon did not compete well in China regardless of GFW.
They are not blocked and they have localized Chinese versions.
Another example, one of the greatest enemy in the history of QQ is, guess what, the re-branded & died MSN Messenger (plus the dead Live Space blogging platform)
We use Amazon a lot, along with JD and sometimes even Taobao. I don't think Amazon has failed in China at all.
Even when western companies come into China, they are often hampered by different rules and forced into JVs with entitled princelings. It is not an apples to apples comparison.
