Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Makes Another Appearance in China
October 30 2017 - 7:15AM
Dow Jones News
By Alyssa Abkowitz
BEIJING-- Facebook may not be back in China, but Mark Zuckerberg
is.
The social-media titan's chairman and chief executive arrived in
Beijing on Saturday for the annual meeting of Tsinghua University
School of Economics and Management's advisory board. He skipped
last year's gathering, though he did visit China in March 2016.
A Facebook Inc. spokeswoman declined to discuss Mr. Zuckerberg's
visit, which comes after a recent series of actions possibly
indicating renewed efforts to re-enter the Chinese market, where
the company's main platform has been blocked since 2009.
In September, Facebook hired William Shuai to lead its
government relations efforts in Beijing. Mr. Shuai was hired away
from social-networking company LinkedIn Inc., which gained access
to China by agreeing to censor its content for local users and by
forming a joint venture with Chinese partners. Earlier this year,
Facebook invested $5 million in registered capital into its Oculus
virtual-reality unit in Shanghai, nearly doubling the amount to
$11.3 million.
It is unclear whether Mr. Zuckerberg met with any Chinese
officials on his trip, which occurred less than a week after the
closing of the country's twice-a-decade political meeting that
cements leadership for the next five years.
Before the advisory board meeting Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg
participated in several events with Tsinghua students.
On Saturday, he heard several students describe their startup
ventures, including a music-composition program that creates tunes
using artificial intelligence and a diagnosis system for heart
disease based on AI.
"Mark said that our project was impressive," said Mo Weishu, one
of the students from the music-composition team who delivered the
presentation to Mr. Zuckerberg. "He suggested that besides
producing music, we should explore product diversification, such as
automatically generating soundtracks for videos."
Earlier this year, Facebook, based in Menlo Park, Calif., and
Tsinghua teamed up to offer a course on insights from Silicon
Valley, which entailed Tsinghua flying in seven Facebook executives
over the semester to teach some of the classes. Two of the projects
Mr. Zuckerberg saw Saturday came out of that course.
Later that evening, Mr. Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself
with Tsinghua students--drawing several comments that pointed to
the obstacles Facebook must overcome for any return of its
social-networking platform to China.
"If you think you can ever convince them about opening up to a
free speech platform like Facebook, forget it," one commenter
wrote. "They just had a 19th Congress that reaffirmed their
commitment for censorship and weeding out dissent."
Mr. Zuckerberg has said he considers China crucial to Facebook's
future, and his participation on the Tsinghua board may be a sign
that he hasn't given up on hopes of re-entering the country's
market, said Mark Natkin, managing director at Marbridge Consulting
in Beijing.
"I think he's someone who likes a challenge and who is
accustomed to beating the system," Mr. Natkin said. "The
arrangement with Tsinghua is probably one of many ways he has come
to believe it may help his company in China."
Mr. Zuckerberg was appointed to the board in 2014 and attended
its annual meeting in 2015.
The Tsinghua board includes other top Western executives with
intense interest in China, notably Tim Cook of Apple Inc. and Tesla
Inc.'s Elon Musk, as well as several of the country's top
technology executives: Jack Ma of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Pony
Ma of Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Robin Li of Baidu Inc.
Xiao Xiao contributed to this article.
Write to Alyssa Abkowitz at alyssa.abkowitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 30, 2017 07:00 ET (11:00 GMT)
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