With the news that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is planning to make a second visit to China this year, speculation that Facebook is set to grovel its way back into China, speculation that has been doing the rounds for months, has picked up again.
Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009.
“We want to connect the whole world,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told reporters Thursday at a Reuters business summit. “And it’s impossible to think about connecting the whole world right now without also connecting China.”
But that may be just its undoing for success in China.
“Facebook’s key advantage is in connecting the world, and in China that becomes its biggest disadvantage because the Chinese government doesn’t want the Chinese people to be connected freely to the rest of the world,” said one web user who wished to remain anonymous.
No date was given for Zuckerberg’s second trip to the mainland — just sometime this year — but a market of hundreds of millions of internet users appears to be just too enticing for him to give up in the name of free speech.
It is not simply a case of Facebook making sure it blocks sensitive key words and abiding by other restrictions in China, as corporate strategic communications advisor David Wolf writes on his blog, Silicon Hutong. On his latest posting he lists nine things Facebook must do to succeed in China. Of these the most interesting are:
- Explain clearly to the west and to its Chinese users what it is willing to sacrifice to comply with Chinese law. If it cannot “publicly defend its approach in China today, better to avoid doing business in China altogether.”
- Get a new name. Chinese web users call Facebook, 非死不可 (feisebuke) which rather unfortunately means must die.
- Be squeaky clean. “There is a double (maybe a triple) standard for companies in China. There is one set of rules for state-owned enterprises, one set of rules for private companies, and a third set of rules for foreign companies. Foreign companies have to operate with greater integrity, transparency, and care than local companies do. For this reason, Facebook needs to operate in China as if it were in the United States and being simultaneously investigated by the FBI, OSHA, and the EPA.” Otherwise, says Wolf, it will give the government a perfect excuse to boot it out again.
