China may ban Facebook, but not its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and he entertained an audience of students in Beijing with a 30-minute chat in his recently learned Mandarin Chinese.
There was no explicit discussion of the ban or any Facebook effort to enter the China market during Wednesday’s question-and-answer session at the prestigious Tsinghua University. But Facebook CEO Mr. Zuckerberg noted during his talk that the social media giant already helps some Chinese companies in foreign markets. He cited computer maker Lenovo’s ads on Facebook in India.
“We are already in China. We help Chinese companies gain customers abroad,” Mr. Zuckerberg said in Chinese. “We want to help the rest of the world connect to China.”
Beijing promotes Internet use for business and education but bans material deemed subversive or obscene and blocks access to foreign websites run by human rights and Tibet activists and some news and social media sites.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s pronunciation was far from fluent, but he was able to maintain intelligible conversation for a half-hour and the students responded with warm cheers for his effort and laughter at his humour.
