Within a few decades, China has risen from a country of rice farmers to one of the leading high-tech nations on this planet - a true platform economy on its own terms. Due to the politically forced regulation and in parts technological isolation of the Internet and its components (in this context one also speaks of the Great Firewall), the platform used primarily via smartphones was able to develop according to its own rules and in a protected market - similar to the natural ecosystem on the Galapagos Islands. For a few years now, this highly efficient machine, optimized for the medium “mobile”, with protagonists such as Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance, Didi Chuxing, Huawei, Tencent

or Xiaomi (to name but a few), has been making the big leap to the West - along the New Silk Roads. Territorial battles with the Western platforms are already taking place, fuelled by politically forced trade wars. Soon the world could consist of two forms of the Internet - one American and one Chinese. This will have such a radical impact on marketing that the accepted doctrines will not only have to be thought out further, but completely readjusted. At the very least, it’s essential for responsible marketers to understand how the platform of China and its Mobile First society work.