Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg went on a charm offensive during his recent visit to China, where he expressed to students at Tsinghua University in Beijing his love of Chinese culture and history.
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“I just gave my first ever speech in Chinese”, he wrote. The themes of believing in your mission, caring more deeply than anyone else and always looking ahead are relevant to anything you might build. past year I joined the board of Tsinghua’s School of Economics and Management.
“I now see the same stories when I look at Chinese companies like Alibaba and Xiaomi”.
Mark Zuckerberg showed off his Mandarin over the weekend during a speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Although many experts agreed that his language skills were far from flawless, the audience was clearly delighted when the American billionaire first began speaking in Mandarin, which he has been learning since 2010.
Invoking a Chinese idiom halfway through the 20-minute speech, Zuckerberg hinted that Facebook would plow ahead in the face of challenges.
China’s had blocked Facebook when independence activists used the site to communicate during a series of riots in the north-west city of Urumqi.
Most recently, while rubbing shoulders in Seattle with the visiting Chinese president Xi Jinping, Mr. Zuckerberg seized the opportunity to practice the language.
A link to Zuckerberg’s speech was shared on Sina Weibo, a homegrown social network popular in China, and users’ reactions were mixed.
“There were so many websites on the Internet, and you could find nearly everything – news, music, books, things to buy – but there was no service to help us find the most important thing to our lives: people”, said Zuckerberg.
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But he added that one billion – roughly China’s population – was just “a number”, and that the company’s real ambition was to connect everyone in the world.
