[LINK] "Why Facebook Won't Give Up on China"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Adam Minter explains Facebook's desire to still get into China in the context of the mercurial policies of China's government towards different social networking platforms.

[T]he most revolutionary service was Tencent's WeChat, released in 2011. At first glance, it looked like just another social network and messaging service. Yet it quickly morphed into something much richer, offering a free video-chat system, a taxi-hailing service, a bill-paying portal and a vast shopping environment. Today it's possible to bank on the system and send money to anyone. Invoking "The Lord of the Rings," some users joke that it's the "one app to rule them all." It now has more than 700 million users, including nearly everyone with internet access in China -- and another 70 million overseas.

Compared to WeChat, Facebook is a desert, with little allure to Chinese users. There aren't any public statistics on how many mainlanders use Facebook, but in my experience they're mostly Chinese who have lived or worked in the West, want to maintain friendships overseas, and have access to the technical means to avoid government blockades. For those without such connections, Facebook's only theoretical appeal is that it provides access to news, posts and videos that are otherwise censored. If and when Facebook is reintroduced, those advantages will disappear -- and so will the most obvious argument for joining.

But Facebook still has one thing going for it, which is surely on Zuckerberg's mind: Technology and social media evolve rapidly in China.

Only two years ago, Sina Weibo was China's biggest and most popular social-media platform. Then, after a government crackdown, it lost its political edge and many of its most popular users, and was left for dead. Even as the eulogies were being written, however, Weibo was reinventing itself. It soon became a platform for live-streaming bloggers and celebrity self-promotion, and it boomed once again, boosted by an astonishing 10 million live broadcasts between April and June of this year -- a 116-fold increase over the previous quarter. Today, Weibo is approaching 300 million users and its most popular live-streamers get multi-million dollar endorsements.