The American company Meta (recognized and banned in Russia as an extremist) faced difficulties while trying to continue working in China due to Beijing’s negative view of the company’s chairman, Mark Zuckerberg. The newspaper writes about it The Wall Street Gazette.
Meta has been trying to continue its business in China since the end of 2021, after being out of the country for more than 10 years due to the blocking of the social network Facebook (the owner of Meta was considered extremist and banned in Russia). The company has made progress in negotiations with Chinese company Tencent to jointly promote its virtual reality headset Quest VR. But in Beijing, the billionaire’s old statements are remembered.
“Zuckerberg accused China, and specifically, ByteDance, the Chinese owner of the TikTok platform, of stealing technology. This reinforced the negative attitude towards the entrepreneur in Beijing,” he says.
Sources said potential partners in China are also wary of Meta’s almost inevitable negative reaction to possible future restrictions on VR content.
Also, WSJ sources are confident that Meta will be forced to offer only local content in China as opposed to offerings to other countries. They also say that Tencent will try to integrate their own ideas and practices into Meta’s VR system.
Currently, Meta apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram (which Meta owns) are classified as extremist and banned in Russia) are blocked in China, a population of 1.4 billion. Zuckerberg is married to Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American, and was learning Chinese in the past.
Formerly Zuckerberg fought On virtual swords with a colleague from Meta.