Four ways Facebook showed how much it wanted China

Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech decrying Chinese censorship, but it wasn’t long ago that he was courting China

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Xinmei Shen

Published: 11:10pm, 18 Oct 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

It seems like Facebook is finally moving on from China.

In a 35-minute speech advocating free expression and addressing concerns about how the social network handles misinformation, CEO Mark Zuckerberg openly fired shots at Chinese censorship. The country’s internet is “focused on very different values,” he said, and is exporting its vision to other countries. He also called out TikTok, the short video app from Beijing-based Bytedance, for censoring protest content around the world, including in the US. (TikTok has denied that China censors its content.)

TikTok, the viral short video sensation, has its roots in China

“Is that the internet we want?” Zuckerberg asked, using China as an example of “pulling back from free expression.”

But Zuckerberg didn’t always take such a tough stance on China. Like other tech companies, there were signs Facebook was looking to break into the country, even if it was never likely that the company’s eponymous website would be unblocked. Among those signs? Zuckerberg himself. Here are four times the Facebook CEO tried courting Chinese authorities.

Hosting China’s top internet regulator

In 2014, Mark Zuckerberg gave a tour to a prominent Chinese government official at Facebook’s headquarters. Lu Wei was then the minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), and he was dubbed by some as “the face of online censorship.”

The tour was part of Lu’s visit to Silicon Valley when he attended an internet conference in US, where he advocated for the idea that countries have the right to control their own internet. In the same trip, Lu reportedly also visited the Apple and Amazon campuses. A Chinese state-run news outlet reported that Zuckerberg conducted the tour in Mandarin and that at one point, Lu asked to sit at Zuckerberg’s desk.