Life

Baidu's face to Facebook talks ignore chime of wedding bells

By Jules Quartly (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-22 08:05

The country's top search engine Baidu is running around like a firefighter attempting to dampen speculation after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg lit the flame and toured its campus in Beijing on Monday.

The 26-year-old billionaire met with 42-year-old CEO Robin Li and they had lunch in the company canteen. The flies on the wall started buzzing, and some camera phone photos taken by a Baidu employee were quickly posted and winged their way around the world, causing embarrassment at company headquarters.

The $64,000 question (though it's worth a lot more than that) is what the two Internet giants talked about. First off, this isn't the pair's first meeting. Their initial hookup was in 2009, and they met again in July this year. So, while this is Zuckerberg's first visit to China, it's not his first attempt to get traction in the local market.

Zuckerberg - known in Chinese as "Make Zhakeboge" - has been upfront about his desire to see Facebook accessible on the mainland, since it started experiencing outages in 2007 and was completely blocked in 2009. His feeling is that 1.4 billion people can't be wrong, and he would love to have them onboard, as he plots world domination of the infoverse.

The headline rumor is that Baidu is attempting to buy out Facebook, although both companies' representatives have said this is fanciful - and it doesn't seem to make much sense. Zuckerberg has been cagey about a public listing, let alone being bought out, and it's not as though he hasn't got the funds to go it alone.

A more likely point of discussion is a Baidu-Facebook social networking site, leveraging Baidu's 400 million users and capitalizing on Baidu's lack of presence in this area, while rivals like Sina have transformed themselves by introducing a highly popular micro-blogging service.

But this could run into political roadblocks. As far back as April, a head hunting company said Facebook was searching for a general manager for the China region, based in Beijing. Google engineers were reportedly poached. Analysts reckoned this was a play to get involved in the online game business here, which would be a less problematic way of gaining a presence in the market, rather than registering a social networking site.

Online, netizens here have generally been underwhelmed by the visit. They don't seem to know that much about Zuckerberg, and the impression is that he might be wasting his time. The only spark of interest was the idea of a Baidu-Facebook alliance that would square up against Google. As for Wang Mengchen, the Baidu employee who uploaded photos of Zuckerberg on Sina Weibo, he deleted his posts and is presumably in the doghouse.

I think this is the first of many visits by Zuckerberg to China. He would have been told by Baidu's Li that connections are the basis for long-term business here - the only business worth having. He has dutifully learned to speak Chinese, so the only hurdle left is to meet up with some political figures around a banquet table and drink a lot of baijiu (Chinese white liquor), a prerequisite of formal negotiations.

And let's not forget, he's here with his Chinese-American girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, and meeting up with her relatives is a sure prelude to marriage. So, the real headline could be wedding bells.