Zuckerberg Wants To Join Forces With Mr Li
December 21st, 2010 | by Jen |BEIJING: ”It was just two nerds comparing notes,” the spokesman said. ”Keep the speculation in check.” But when those nerds happened to be the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, and Robin Li, the head of Baidu, the biggest search engine in China, there was no way a quiet business lunch was going to remain quiet.
Moments after Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Li were seen strolling through the canteen in Baidu’s Beijing headquarters on Monday, an employer posted a blurred mobile phone photograph of them on her microblog.
The image spread quickly, first via Chinese social networking sites, then on to the English-speaking side of the internet, prompting speculation the two IT players may be planning to cross the divide.
Mr Zuckerberg has made no secret of his desire to expand in China, where Facebook has been blocked by the government censors’ Great Firewall since 2008. On a recent global map of Facebook users, China appeared as a black spot, though it has a bigger internet population than any country.
Mr Zuckerberg’s holiday is his first known trip behind the Great Firewall. But he has started Mandarin lessons and recently asked Facebook members for tips on places to visit with his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. In a recent speech at Stanford University, he said the company might turn its attention to China in a year if it can first crack Japan, South Korea and Russia.
”How can you connect the whole world if you leave out a billion people?” he asked. ”Our theory is that if we can show that we as a Western company can succeed in a place where no other country has, then we can start to figure out the right partnerships we would need to succeed in China on our terms.”
Mr Zuckerberg appears to have found common ground with Mr Li, an internet entrepreneur who has completed a postgraduate course in the US.
Since then he has shrugged off Google and Yahoo, as well as criticism about a supposedly weak stance on censorship and copyright piracy, to make Baidu the dominant force in the Chinese search engine market. In an earlier interview with The Guardian, Mr Li said Baidu would one day become an international rival to Microsoft and Google.
After the two were introduced at Palo Alto last year, they met twice before this week, and apparently hit it off.