Mark Zuckerberg Is Charming China In Mandarin

As language challenges go, learning Chinese has to be one of the toughest, never mind doing what Facebook chief exec Mark Zuckerberg has achieved and picked up enough Mandarin to handle a Q&A session in Beijing entirely in the native tongue. Zuckerberg surprised students at Tsinghua University by breaking into Chinese from the outset of the question session; Facebook is on a charm offensive in China, where the social site is officially blocked, though expansion wasn't the only strong motivation to expand his linguistic abilities, however.

In fact, as Zuckerberg explained to the audience, communicating better with his wife Priscilla Chan was one of the key motivators, not to mention her Chinese family.

Other reasons – beyond wanting to understand more about the culture behind the language – include the sheer challenge of it itself. Being a tonal language, Mandarin is distinctly different from English, the difficulty of which drove Zuckerberg to make learning it his self-imposed yearly challenge back in 2010.

Exactly how well he did is not totally clear, but judging by the warm reception at Tshinghua University the young CEO seems to have sufficiently charmed the audience with his attempts, at least.

While in Beijing, Zuckerberg also met with Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun for dinner, he revealed, though didn't say what the two had discussed.

Another topic on the agenda was Internet.org, the project to bring affordable web access to developing nations that the Facebook founder has helped spearhead.

More locally, Facebook intends to hire more Chinese students in 2015, Zuckerberg told the crowd, not to mention pushing Chinese advertisers to the social network's global audience. Still, there's no official access to the site for Chinese users themselves, though that didn't stop Zuckerberg from uploading a video of the Q&A to his own Facebook page.

VIA LATimes

SOURCE Mark Zuckerberg