Chinese president Xi Jinping (centre) talks to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as Lu Wei, China's Internet czar, looks on during a gathering of CEOs and Chinese officials in Redmond, Washington in September 2015 Ted S. Warren-Pool/Getty Images

In 2015, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was having dinner with Chinese president Xi Jinping at the White House. Zuckerberg, who was soon to become a father for the first time, asked Xi a bold question: might he proffer a name for his child? This is a privilege in Chinese custom usually reserved for older relatives and Xi, predictably, demurred.

Facebook has been blocked in China since the Ürümqi riots of July 2009. At the time, 384 million people in China were online – or around 29 per cent of the country’s population. That figure now stands at more than 730 million – or 53 per cent. Nowhere else in the world are so many potential Facebook users out of Zuckerberg’s reach, and it’s a loss he feels keenly.


Facebook currently has 2.07 billion monthly active users. It took the social network a little over eight years to reach one billion. It added its next billion in less than five. As it hurtles after Zuckerberg’s stated mission of connecting everyone in the world, its main hurdle is running out of people. In the US, almost eight-in-ten online Americans use Facebook. In China, nobody does. Zuckerberg insists that China’s billion-plus population is only “a number”, but Facebook’s business model is built on numbers: of users, of likes, of shares, of advertising dollars and yuan.

“There is a good Chinese saying, which says that if you work at it hard enough, you can grind an iron bar into a needle. If you keep working hard, you will change the world.” Mark Zuckerberg

Read next Without the daily commute, there is nothing to stop us burning out Without the daily commute, there is nothing to stop us burning out

That mantra of connecting the world was thrown into sharp relief last week when the social network announced the most significant change to the algorithm that powers its News Feed to date. Zuckerberg wrote that the change was to stop posts from businesses, brands and media from “crowding out the personal moments”. The subtext to all this? News. Facebook never wanted to be a news organisation and is now attempting to make a hasty but calculated retreat.

As the algorithmic change takes effect, Facebook News Feeds are being filled with friendly, innocuous updates about people’s lives. No news. No controversy. Just baby videos and photos of sunsets. As my colleague Wolfgang Blau argues, news journalism has become “a strategic burden” for Facebook in its bid to connect everyone in the world. Nowhere more so then in China. “Wrapping too much journalism around your brand is a mistake for any platform hoping to still make it into China,” Blau, president of WIRED publisher Condé Nast International, wrote in a post on Medium. In short: by simplifying your News Feed, Facebook’s long-term goal is to become a truly global player. Make no mistake: when Zuckerberg says he wants to connect every person in the world, he means it.


How an army of postmen is turning China's rural stores into the world's largest retail network E-commerce How an army of postmen is turning China's rural stores into the world's largest retail network

Missing out on business and revenue in China isn’t a problem unique to Facebook. Google upped-sticks in 2014 and has never returned. Twitter is blocked, as is Facebook-owned Instagram. All have fallen foul of China’s myriad of extreme regulations on censorship and data collection. In their place are Baidu, RenRen and Weibo. LinkedIn and Skype are available in China, but only as a result of partnering with local companies and agreeing to strict censorship and data collection laws. These requirements remain a price Facebook is unwilling to pay. For now.

Facebook’s latest algorithmic twist will be, in the short term, catastrophic for many online publishers. Referrals will fall of a cliff edge, leaving some who rely too heavily on Facebook’s slurry of traffic to wither and die. It will also likely hit levels of engagement on Facebook. But, in the long term, it will strip Facebook back to a simpler, more manageable beast.

China, at least publicly, is open to the idea of Facebook, Google, et al. operating within its great firewall. “If they want to come back, we welcome,” said Qi Xiaoxia, director general of the Bureau of International Cooperation at the Cyberspace Administration of China in a speech at the UN’s European headquarters in December 2017. “The condition is that they have to abide by Chinese law and regulations. That is the bottom line. And also that they would not do any harm to Chinese national security and national consumers’ interests.”

Getting Facebook unblocked in China is a long game. In 2010, Zuckerberg started learning Mandarin. In 2014, he delivered his first public address in China’s most-spoken language at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a sort-of Chinese Massachusetts Institute of Technology for which he is an advisor. A year later, Zuckerberg was back in China, delivering another, far more fluent speech at the same university. “There is a good Chinese saying, which says that if you work at it hard enough, you can grind an iron bar into a needle,” he told the audience. “If you keep working hard, you will change the world.”


In order to see this embed, you must give consent to Social Media cookies. Open my cookie preferences. It's great to be back in Beijing! I kicked off my visit with a run through Tiananmen Square, past the Forbidden City and... Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, March 17, 2016

Which is probably why, in 2016, he shifted his fairly transparent lobbying to blunt symbolism. One smoggy March morning, Zuckerberg went jogging (without a mask, face beaming with an expression approximating a smile) through Tiananmen Square – “great to be back in Beijing!” he wrote (on Facebook, somehow, despite being in China) – on a day when the city’s air quality climbed past a hazardous 300 parts per million. At such levels, any amount of outdoor exertion is extremely unwise. As one Sina Weibo user quipped at the time, to break into the Chinese market Zuckerberg will have to work his lungs hard, too.

And, slowly but surely, Facebook is making progress. Days before it dropped its algorithm bomb, Facebook announced a major partnership with Chinese smartphone brand Xiaomi to make virtual reality headsets. The Mi VR Standalone, sold only in China, will also carry the Oculus logo. It’s a small victory for Facebook. And Zuckerberg will hope it’s the first of many.