A story published on Chinese news website China.com.cn featured Zuckerberg meeting Chinese internet regulator Lu Wei at Facebook’s California headquarters last week during Lu’s visit to the United States. The story included a photo of Lu and Zuckerberg in the latter’s office, with a copy of President Xi’s book “The Governance of China” lying on a desk. The story also noted that Zuckerberg, who has recently learned Mandarin, told the visiting Chinese delegation that he had “bought copies of this book for my colleagues,” adding that he wanted them “to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Hu Jia, a well-known dissident in China, has said that China’s anti-government activists had reacted to Zuckerberg’s comments with “disappointment and anger.” Hu noted that while “Zuckerberg is an internet genius…his understanding of Chinese politics is like that of a three-year-old, not a 30-year-old,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying. He added that in China, “the top three enemies of the internet are the Communist Party, Xi Jinping and Lu Wei.”
Some Chinese social media commentators have also criticized Zuckerberg for his “brown-nosing” of the Chinese, one user of the microblogging service Weibo noting that “Mark is going all out to make money,” saying that “he’s just one step away from joining the Communist Party.” Another user posted a Tweet featuring Zuckerberg in a Maoist Red Guards poster with a copy of Xi’s book in the place of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book.
lol pic.twitter.com/vaT6P2VPlZ
— Fergus Ryan (@fryan) 8 декабря 2014
Business is Business
Professor Zhang Ming from Beijing’s Renmin University noted that while the timing of Zuckerberg’s remarks may have been unfortunate, given a perceived tightening of internet regulation in China, they were not surprising. “He is a businessman. Business is business,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying.
Zuckerberg, who recently charmed Beijing students in a Q&A in Mandarin in late October, wants to expand Facebook’s 1.23 billion user base to China’s 650 million internet users, Reuters explained.
Chinese authorities have noted that China would welcome Facebook onto the country's internet if it complied with their conception of ‘internet sovereignty’. "If China's laws and regulations are respected, we welcome all of the world's Internet companies to enter the Chinese market," Lu had said in late October, IDG News quoted him as saying. "First, you can't damage the national interests of the country. Second is you cannot hurt the benefits of Chinese consumers," he added.
Lo Shih-hung, a professor at the Department of Communication at Taiwan’s Chung Cheng University added that “the Chinese market is too attractive not to be in,” noting that “for Facebook to get into the market, it might require them to make compromises ranging from setting up a local operation to sharing user data,” Bloomberg explained.
Last week Lu conducted a fact-finding trip to the United States, meeting with executives from Google, Amazon, Apple and other IT companies before heading to Washington DC for the seventh US-China Internet Industry Forum.