Just last month, we wrote that China had about 300,000 Facebook users. In less than 4 weeks, that figure has doubled to over 694,000 users. What happened?
We made a check on just-ping.com and as of now, Facebook.com remains blocked in China. The only thing that had happened over the last couple of months between Facebook and China was Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to the country. Zuckerberg’s trip to China could be a possible reason why the figure had ballooned.
Mark Zuckerberg had visited several Chinese technology companies, including Baidu, Sina and Alibaba. The Facebook head had also met up with China Mobile’s China Wang Jianzhou to discuss “the possibility of cooperation” in China. However, it was reported that there wasn’t any agreement reached so far between China Mobile and Facebook. Perhaps, Mark Zuckerberg’s presence in China has influenced more Chinese to sign up for Facebook.
“I think more of us signed up for Facebook because of Mark Zuckerberg’s visit in China. His presence has somehow promoted Facebook in our country,” said Aileen Meng, a professional working in the Internet industry in Beijing China.
Asia has more 143 million Facebook users and only 0.5 percent of them are from China. Nonetheless, Facebook’s growth rate in China is growing strongly at 84 percent and is also the highest growth rate in Asia, according to SocialBakers’s statistics. Mark Zuckerberg once said, “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out 1.6 billion people?”
If this impressive growth rate were to continue, it wouldn’t take too long before he can connect China with the world. But it remains to be seen if this figure will continue its strong growth. The Chinese government wouldn’t be too happy if it learned that a significant proportion of users are bypassing its firewall system. So, my advice for the Chinese users is to stay clear and use it just for networking. Any anti-government messages on Facebook will see Zuckerberg’s effort to connect China go down the drain.
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In order to Internet World Stats, China has on the 31th of March, 2011, stil 391 thousand Facebook Users, not 694 thousand.