China is a huge potential land for social networking start-ups. Somehow, those existing social networking giants are facing a challenge to overcome various entry barriers into the heart of its around half internet users out of its billion people.
It has its own giants, for example Qzone, RenRen, and Weibo. As a result, it can be crowned as an isolated online community. The “Great Firewall of China” imposes strict entry requirement for its internet accessibility. Web contents that are deemed as harmful or inappropriate will be blocked for a purpose – improvement of virtual environment.
Taking Facebook as example, its mission is to make the world more open and connected. Nonetheless, it is now being banned by China which has mentioned as one of the risk factors in the public filing with Securities Exchange Commission.
“China is a large potential market for Facebook, but users are generally restricted from accessing Facebook from China. We do not know if we will be able to find an approach to managing content and information that will be acceptable to use and to the Chinese government.”
Yet, in that particular documentation, Facebook does not state any expansion plan into China market. According to TechRice.com, it argued that Facebook could neither be a censored site nor provide China netizens with technology to circumvent the Great Firewall. This both suggestions that are probably unworkable sparked in a Quora thread about the personal visit of Mark Zuckerberg to this country.
It is not expected to have “Facebook China” in the near term, or probably until the China government switches off its censorship system. Facebook has been a successful connection among the rest of the world except the China big market. However, Mark’s natural curiosity towards this Chinese-speaking country is believed to never stop Facebook’s tapping journey.
Of course, it will not be the day when Facebook is going to appease the China authorities. Similar goes to other social networking sites. No matter how big is the China market solely, any social media companies will be looking forward to the large lose of its current users. Neither one mankind will accept to compromise together with China’s internet users. Some China netizens may not welcome those censored sites, though.
China’s mediascape is not easy to venture into at all. Actually, most people thought that foreign-based social sites never embrace a real, complete success such as Twitter, Google and Youtube. But they will not fail even without China’s million users.
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