SHANGHAI — For Facebook, success in China was brief. Very brief.

For several hours, a Chinese government database showed that Facebook had gained approval to open a subsidiary in the eastern province of Zhejiang. Facebook said it would use the company to set up an innovation hub there.

Then the registration disappeared, and references to the subsidiary were partly censored in Chinese media.

Now the approval has been withdrawn, according to a person familiar with the matter who declined to be named because the person was not authorized to speak on the record.

While the about-face does not definitively end Facebook’s chances of establishing the company, it makes success very unlikely, the person said. The decision to take down the approval, the person added, came after a disagreement between officials in Zhejiang and the national internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, which was angry that it had not been consulted more closely.