Do you even speak Mandarin, to begin with? Chinese segment was a normal part of the Internet till the second half of 2000s. Baidu in particular was a competitive search engine, and another dotcom crash survivor, along with Yandex, Google, Yahoo etc.

If we re talking about the chinese-speaking internet then what's the point of talking about "splitting"? Splitting implies that international users used it, and now don't.

It makes more sense to use splitting to refer to access, rather than use. No group anywhere uses all of the www, but in the past all groups at least had the option of doing so.

Edit: it was probably a much more significant change from the Chinese point of view than the Western one, since propertionally more Chinese speak English and browse English sites than Westerners speak Mandarin and browse Chinese sites.