On Dec. 20, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg -- who was recently named Time's 2010 "Person of the Year" -- stopped by the Beijing offices of Baidu, China's leading web-search company, to chat with co-founder Robin Li. The two men, both youthful, energetic, self-made billionaires, have much in common. In addition to Silicon Valley ties (after leaving Harvard University, the now 26-year-old Zuckerberg took his company to the Valley; and the 42-year-old Li studied in the United States and worked in the Valley before moving back to Beijing), they share an affection for no-frills attire (Li's bright-colored polo shirts and windbreakers are a notch fancier than Zuckerberg's storied brown hoodies), lofty spots on their country's respective most-wealthy lists (Li ranked second on Forbes's 2010 "China Rich List" and Zuckerberg was 35th on the American version), and planetary ambitions.
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Whether or not any formal partnership was discussed -- Baidu spokesperson Kaiser Kuo declined to share details of the meeting with Bloomberg News -- one thing is certain: If Zuckerberg is seriously considering entering the Chinese market, which means learning to play by Beijing's rules, there is no better guide than Li.
Facebook is officially blocked in China, alongside other foreign-owned social-networking sites, including Twitter. That means that Facebook's 550 million users do not include any (or very few) of China's 420 million-and-counting Internet users. When a Facebook employee recently mapped social networks among the site's global users, China was rendered as an ominously dark space, among the last unconquered frontiers. But over the past year, there have been an increasing trickle of news stories that Facebook is eyeing the Middle Kingdom.
In October, Zuckerberg told an Internet forum at Stanford University that Facebook must "figure out the right partnerships we would need to succeed in China on our terms.... China has values that are somewhat different from the U.S.... I would spend a lot of time studying it."
Entering China would first mean bowing to Beijing's political requirements. (This spring, Google decided it was no longer willing to play ball, and so withdrew its search operations from mainland China.) No outsider can predict what Facebook's principled growth calculus might be, but it is possible to sketch out what Zuckerberg would have to stomach if China is indeed among his next targets.
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