In the U.S., you really only have toremember two long numbers, ever: Your phone number and your Social Securitynumber. In China, you’re constantly barraged by digits: QQ numbers (QQ isChina's most popular chat service), email addresses, and even URLs. Forexample, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if thattakes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to seeone of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used carsat 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.

Why the preference for digits over letters?It mostly has to do with ease of memorization. To a native English-speaker,remembering a long string of digits might seem harder than memorizing a word.But that's if you understand the word. For many Chinese, numbers are easier toremember than Latin characters. Sure, Chinese children learn the pinyin systemthat uses the Roman alphabet to spell out Mandarin words (for example, the wordfor "Internet", is spelled wangluo in pinyin). And yes, Arabic numerals (1-2-3)are technically just as much a foreign import as the Roman alphabet (A-B-C).But most Chinese are more familiar with numbers than letters, especially thosewho didn’t go to college. To many, "Hotmail.com" might as well beCyrillic.

The digits in a domain name usually aren'trandom. The Internet company NetEase uses the web address 163.com—a throwbackto the days of dial-up when Chinese Internet users had to enter 163 to getonline. The phone companies China Telecom and China Unicom simplyreappropriated their well-known customer service numbers as domain names, 10086.cnand 10010.cn, respectively.

Digits are even more convenient when youconsider that the words for numbers are homophones for other words. The URL forthe massive e-commerce site Alibaba, for example, is 1688.com,pronounced "yow-leeyoh-ba-ba"—close enough! Those digits can just as often haveindividual meanings. The videosharing site 6.cn works because the word for "six" is a near-homophone forthe word “to stream.” The number five is pronounced wu, which sounds like wo,which means "I". The number one is pronounced yao, whichwith a different tone means "want". So the job-hunting site 51job.com sounds alot like “I want a job.” Likewise, to order McDonald's delivery online, just goto 4008-517-517.com, the "517" of which sounds a bit like "I want to eat". (AnEnglish equivalent might be the oldradio jingle, “How many cookies did Andrew eat? Andrew 8-8000.”)

This kind of number-language has become aninfinitely malleable shorthand among Chinese web users: 1 means "want", 2 means"love", 4 means "dead” or "world" or is, "5 "means "I",7 means "wife" or"eat", 8 means "get rich" or "not", and 9 means "long time" or "alcohol".Thenumbers 5201314, for example, mean 我愛你一生一世,or “I will love you forever”; 0748 means “go die”; and 687 means"I'm sorry". (See herefor more examples.) Chinese has plenty of other number-based slang, such aserbaiwu, or "250",which means "idiot", or "38", pronounced sanba, which means"bitch". And of course there’s the association of certain numbers with good orbad luck, and the subsequent demand for addresses and phone numbers with lotsof 8s ("get rich") and minimal 4s ("die"). Back in 2003, a Chinese airline paid $280,000for the phone number 88888888.

Why don't Chinese web addresses just useMandarin characters? Because that’s a pain, too. The Internet Corporation forAssigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which sets the rules for web addressesglobally, has periodicallyhypedthe expansion of domain names to include non-Latinate scripts, but Chinese websites have yet to take full advantage. Some devices require a special plug-into type in Chinese URLs, and even then it takes longer to type or write outcharacters than to input a few digits. Plus, for web sites that want to expandinternationally but don’t want to alienate foreign audiences with unfamiliarcharacters, numbers are a decent compromise.

Still, the numbers/letters divide isemblematic of the Internet's built-in bias: Even more than two decades afterits birth, it's still a fundamentally American system. (Sorry, Tim Berners-Lee.) ICANNis an American non-profit corporation, though the U.S. recently agreedto hand it over to a "global multi-stakeholder community" in 2015. ASCII, thecharacter-encoding scheme that was long used on most web pages, is short forthe "American Standard Code for Information Interchange." In 2012, the UnitedStates refusedto sign an international telecommunications treaty, supported by bothRussia and China, that would shift the Internet away from its currentU.S.-centric form of governance. In other words, the structure of the Internetis a constant reminder of American digital hegemony, from WiFi standards toGPS. Even the ".cn" at the end of Chinese URLs comes from the English word forChina, not the Chinese word for China. You can’t blame other countries forwanting to tell the American 250s to 0748.