Facebook to be allowed to enter China soon, maybe
Staff Reporter 2015-09-30 16:59
Zuckerberg posted the picture of his meeting with Xi Jinping — on Facebook. (Internet photo)
Facebook, long blocked in China, may be allowed to enter the country in the near future — that is the conclusion being drawn from the fact that China's president, Xi Jinping, permitted a picture of him meeting Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to be posted on the country's social networking sites, reports our Chinese-language sister paper Want Daily.
The picture suggests Xi is willing to accept Facebook or allow the social networking site to operate in China, said Teng Jianqun, a researcher with the China Institute of International Studies, at an event held by the All-China Journalists Association on Monday. The Chinese government has no more reason to restrict social networking websites' access to China since Xi met Zuckerberg in person, he said.
Teng declined to estimate when Facebook will be allowed to enter China and only said he believes it will be soon or in near future. The impact of Facebook's entry will be profound and the positive influences will be greater than the negative, he predicted.
Zuckerberg met Xi along with other US tech leaders in Seattle on the first day of the Chinese president's state visit to the United States last week, and they conversed entirely in Mandarin, the Facebook founder later claimed. Learning Chinese has been one way Zuckerberg has sought to curry favor and his study has ben more than token — he previously held a full Q&A session at Tsinghua University in Beijing in Chinese. He also let it be known that he has read the collection of Xi Jinping's speeches published as Xi Jinping: The Governance of China and distributed copies to his colleagues.
The picture of Xi and Zuckerberg together was nonetheless treated with ironic humor, with the Shanghaiist website posting it as China's president meeting with the "man in charge of the 404 Not Found website."
Facebook, which has over 968 million daily users worldwide as of June 2015, has been blocked in China since 2009, along with Twitter and YouTube, though Chinese clones of each service are thriving. It can only be acessed from within China by people who use VPN services to jump the country's "Great Firewall."
Lu Wei, director of the State Internet Information Office, the country's head of internet censorship, said at a press conference last year: "I did not say it [Facebook] cannot enter China but I also did not say it can enter China." The standard line, expressed by Lu at the time, is that said foreign internet companies must abide by the country's laws and regulations. They can only take up a market share and make money in China market if they are not deemed to be hurting China's national interests. In other words, companies must fall in line with the government's censorship directives and may have the plug pulled at any time by an arbitrary decision.
