Facebook is bent on friending China, but …
Face it Mark Zuckerberg, your relationship status with China is never going to change. Here’s why
Zuckerberg really, really wants his social network to operate in China. Back in early 2010, the CEO publicly challenged himself to learn Mandarin. And soon he was negotiating furiously to enter the Chinese market (still speaking English, of course). He made well-publicised visits to top Chinese tech companies. By early 2011, according to company insiders, Zuckerberg believed he had a deal to partner Baidu and together launch a version of Facebook in China.
The Arab Spring changed all that. President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled from Tunisia in mid-January, and Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak resigned in early February. It was a clear sign to the world, and to the Chinese Communist Party leadership, that Facebook had concrete political potency, by empowering ordinary citizens to organise and speak out against governments they did not like. Facebook’s deal with Baidu was decisively cancelled.
Ask Google? How to win in China … without being evil
Now Facebook and its arch-rival Google are both ramping up new efforts in China. It’s not hard to see why. China is by far the world’s largest internet community, the fastest-growing region for e-commerce, and soon to be the world’s largest economy. Indeed, it is already the second largest source of advertising revenue for Facebook. While government control of the internet has only strengthened in China, these vastly profitable global companies desperately want in on the action.