Zuckerberg’s Mandarin charm offensive
Print Edition
FACEBOOK co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg delighted an audience of students at Beijing’s Tsinghua University yesterday by chatting to them for 30 minutes in Mandarin.
Though the billionaire’s pronunciation proved a challenge for native speakers, the assembled crowd listened with interest as he answered questions about Facebook’s relationship with China.
“I have a more difficult question for Mark, which I hope will not get me fired. What are Facebook’s plans in China?” asked forum facilitator and Facebook employee Wei Xiaoliang, amid laughter and applause.
“We are already in China,” Zuckerberg said in Chinese, to more laughter. “We help Chinese firms gain customers abroad,” he said, citing computer maker Lenovo’s ads on the social media site in India.
Zuckerberg was recently appointed as a member of the advisory board of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management.
Despite his often wayward pronunciation, Zuckerberg was able to maintain an intelligible conversation for half an hour and his audience responded with cheers for his effort and laughter at his humor.
Zuckerberg married Chinese-American Priscilla Chan in 2012, two years after setting himself the goal of learning Mandarin. He said on Wednesday that he wanted to learn the language partly because his wife’s grandmother speaks only Chinese.
“Priscilla and I decided to get married, so I told her grandmother in Chinese, and she was very surprised,” Zuckerberg said.
Describing China as a great country, he said he hoped learning the language would help him to learn its culture.
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