Following its programme to fuel a global obsession with generative art, ten-month-old Midjourney seems poised to enter the Middle Kingdom, the world's biggest Internet market.

An account on Tencent-owned social platform WeChat published a post late on Monday saying the firm has begun accepting applications from beta test users. However, the account deleted its first and only article Tuesday.

There isn't a clear reason why this post suddenly disappeared following an overwhelming reception in China. "Applications would be open for just a few hours every Monday and Friday, the original post said, and users quickly filled up the first quota on launch day. TechCrunch has not been able to test the product.".

The owner of the WeChat account is a company called Pengyuhui based in Nanjing. Founded in October, there is very little public information available for this company. TechCrunch was unable to verify the identity of the firm, and has reached out to Midjourney for comment.

Launching an internet app in China is not exactly an easy task, given China's relatively strict regulatory environment. This is why many foreign startups end up partnering with local players, who will run their services on their behalf.

There have been a number of applications posing themselves as the China version of Midjourney, but this one looks the most serious. The copycats are easily detectable: they just ask a user for money, and don't care about community building. "Midjourney China" said in the post that it is releasing a new iteration daily or so and has a 24/7 support team answering all the questions of its users.

Fairly, it has a strategy behind the label "Midjourney China." It ran on a QQ channel, more or less the closest thing China has to a Discord server. QQ is a PC-era legacy messenger built by Tencent. Amid China's generative AI craze, QQ has had center stage in helping to build communities. A rising open source neural network project known as RWKV, for example, has gained several thousand developers and users on QQ.

Tencent and "Midjourney China" haven't partnered up through QQ, a source close to the matter said, but the latter has signed up as the third-party client, beginning its processes of user acquisition on its own.

Midjourney fandom
Tech-savvy Chinese netizens can't be strangers to Midjourney, but until now, they have accessed the text-to-image generator through informal means and circumvention methods.

To reach the Discord, where the Midjourney bot operates, one has to employ VPN to bypass the Great Firewall that has blocked this social network. Then users who don't have credit cards must seek agents who help sign up and fund top-ups for their Midjourney subscriptions. Credit cards are also scarce in China, which is largely skipping the phase of cash to mobile payments.

However, with the absence of ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other similar entities in China, a host of domestic alternatives have cropped up. It would be great to see if San Francisco-based company can find users for its art generator, ERNIE-ViLG, developed by Baidu and startup Tiamat, if "Midjourney China" is indeed a legitimate player.

How China is building a parallel generative AI universe

"Midjourney China" doesn't look very different from the original art generator at first sight. Users send prompts on the QQ channel to generate images, which they can then modify with further instructions according to its debut article. After 25 free images, they need to start paying through a price scheme that's on par with the Discord-based version.

A complicated market
" Midjourney China" is surfacing at a moment when a string of Western internet behemoths are pulling back. Just last week, LinkedIn announced that it would close down InCareer, an app developed with the country's regulatory environment in mind but arguably lacked sufficient demand. Midjourney would face the same challenge of meeting the requirements of the country's compliance while going head-to-head with better-established domestic competitors.

Any foreign player seeking the China market needs to be prepared for its regulations that are constantly in the red. For one, the country demands real-name verification for users of generative AI, as does virtually every other internet service operating in its territory. "Midjourney China" might have easily satisfied this pre-requisite by running on QQ where all user accounts, by default, are linked to one's real identity.

There are more stringent requirements. New rules that cover the use of synthetic media have been implemented by the Chinese government lately. Examples include requiring service providers to label fabricated pictures meant to mislead members of the public. They are also compelled to track all unlawful utilization of AI and immediately report such incidents to the relevant authorities. There can be little doubt that Midjourney in any of these configurations will need to censor keywords considered politically sensitive in China — a practice the company already engages in to some extent.
 
It then leads one to wonder about how "Midjourney China" and QQ divide the burden and costs of monitoring user behavior when/if the application reaches a critical mass in China.