September 10, 2012:CNN
CEO Mark Zuckerberg would like to reach the country's 513 million Internet users. Too bad local entrepreneurs have beaten him to the punch.
FORTUNE -- Last May when Mark Zuckerberg wed his Chinese-American girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a joke began to make the rounds on China's version of Twitter, a microblog -- or weibo -- run by the Internet portal Sina. It went something like this: Chan brings Zuck to meet her extended family in Shanghai. "What do you do?" they ask him.
"I run the most popular website in the world," he responds. So they plug "Facebook" into a browser, and nothing pops up.
"You're a fraud! This Facebook doesn't exist!" they reply.
It's hilarious to everyone except Facebook (FB). The company's stated mission is to connect the entire world, but it can't reach a third of the globe's population. The Chinese government has blocked its citizens' access to the site since 2009. That's 513 million Chinese Internet users (more than twice the number of wired Americans), who make up an increasingly powerful consumer block. And they're passionate social networkers. They spend 46 minutes a day visiting social-media sites, according to a recent McKinsey study, compared with just 37 minutes in the U.S.
Full story at CNN
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