Will Facebook Follow Zuckerberg To China? Inevitably

   Mark Zuckerberg likely learned something about how to play nice with the Chinese government — and make a lot of money while you’re at it — from his meetings in China with the billionaire co-founder of Baidu, Robin Li; the CEO of state-owned telecom giant China Mobile, Wang Jianzhou; the CEO of leading online portal and microblog site Sina.com, Charles Chao; and the billionaire head of Alibaba Group and online retail juggernaut Taobao, Jack Ma.

     But were these get-togethers a precursor to something bigger, a negotiated entry into the China marketplace? Will Facebook eventually play nice with the Chinese government, ushering in an era of a censored China Facebook? My guess: Yes.

     Some observers of Zuckerberg’s China-capades have suggested his visit to tech companies mean nothing, that his trip here is strictly personal. I think they’re wrong. You can sense Zuckerberg’s thirst for the Chinese market in his public comments before the trip, and now he has held meetings with the industry leaders who can provide helpful insights on how to tap that market. No, this trip is not just about the girlfriend and in-laws.

     Meeting people like Li, Wang, Chao and Ma is smart because entering China will be tricky: Launching “Facebook.cn” would require deft maneuvering with the Chinese government, of course, and has the potential to be a public and customer relations nightmare that could dwarf the problems Google had in its attempt to host a China-based search engine. We know how that ended, but more important, the execs Zuckerberg has met with all will have some ideas on how to navigate these issues.

    Commentators have had a field day speculating about Zuckerberg’s field trip, including my colleague Oliver Chiang, who followed the China vacation from the quirky planning stages to his latest stop, and who noted that one Baidu executive, at least, has spoken up on his own in favor of a China entry for Facebook. Blogger Bill Bishop cheekily suggests another option, that Facebook offer Chinese Internet users a way around the Great Firewall to use the service, which has been blocked since just after the Xinjiang riots of 2009 (less controversially, Bishop also suggests Zuckerberg could win some Chinese fans by proposing to his girlfriend on the Great Wall of China, instead of breaching the Great Firewall). China’s Global Times, meanwhile, dismissed Facebook’s potential in an opinion piece yesterday under the headline, “China not an easy market for Facebook.”

    The best-argued case against a China entry that I have seen was laid out yesterday by Kai Lukoff, co-founder of techrice.com, in his post, “Why Mark Zuckerberg Came To China and Why Facebook Will Not.” Lukoff writes:

I see no implementation of “Facebook China” that could appease the government without infuriating Western/international users and/or jeopardizing its global interconnectedness (which would also be its competitive advantage in China). Questions to consider:

• Who would “Facebook China” censor and who not?
• How would Facebook wall off the accounts of young Chinese who study overseas, set up accounts, and return to China?
• Would Facebook stop current news, like Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo, from spreading and trending?
• Would it turn over the personal details tied to accounts?

    How about that — a privacy problem that would rival, well, Facebook’s existing privacy concerns. Privacy issues in China can have a more ominous edge to them, as we saw in the case of Shi Tao, a journalist who was sentenced to 10 years in prison based in part on identifying evidence that Chinese authorities demanded — and received — from Yahoo. Then again, Facebook is a real-name business, not a place for dissidents to go into hiding.

     There is at least one other related issue, in light of the WikiLeaks suggestion that Chinese leaders authorized hacking intrusions into Google: the likelihood of Chinese hack attempts on Facebook would seem to increase if the company added on millions of mainland Chinese users (many of whom currently use Chinese social networking sites). Sure, some Chinese leaders have always distrusted Google, but Facebook, on which people can connect and spread information quickly and organize — that makes the system a little more nervous. Beijing has enough headaches with its homegrown Web 2.0 services like Sina’s Twitter-like Weibo, on which New York Times columnist Nick Kristof made a brief appearance yesterday to prove that China censors its Internet, a “victory” that would seem to define the word “pyrrhic.”

     But Zuckerberg has already answered the question of whether Facebook will go to China with a question of his own: “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?” That powerful notion — connecting the whole world — is what will trump arguments against a Facebook entry into China even in the eyes of many Western users.

     It is easy to overestimate the impact of any outcry by Western or international critics when it comes to China; more important, one should not underestimate the rest of the world’s willingness to accept compromises in connecting with China. Zuckerberg’s question also defines his terms of business in a way that differs importantly from Google’s existential China crisis: Facebook is not, first and foremost, about the free flow of information; it is about connecting people.

    Will there be blowback, outrage and constant discussion of the impact of censorship on Facebook in China? Of course. Will much of that venting take place on Facebook? Most likely. Let a hundred Facebook groups bloom; Zuckerberg will welcome them. If the viral campaign against you is taking place on your platform, you’re in good shape.

    At the same time, Zuckerberg will open his gated community to a customer base of Internet users that numbers more than the entire U.S. population. Virtually all companies, even Google for four years, have succumbed to the temptations of the Chinese market. It would be foolish to think Facebook won’t succumb one day, too.