At the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing on Saturday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivered his first Chinese-language speech, in which he spoke about why he founded Facebook and his future ambitions.
Though Zuckerberg had already briefly spoken in Mandarin to Chinese students a year earlier, he made a significant step forward yesterday through giving a 22-minute speech completely in Chinese. On his Facebook page shortly after the event, he revealed that it was his “first-ever speech in Chinese”.
Topics addressed during the talk included his mission “to connect people online”; he noted that, back when he founded Facebook in 2004, “there were so many websites on the Internet and you could find almost everything—news, music, books, things to buy—but there was no service to help us find the most important thing to our lives: people”.
Expanding the social networking site’s business beyond America is on his agenda for the future, he emphasized. And, in his aim to continue connecting people, he likened himself to such Chinese companies as Alibaba and Xiaomi.
The speech has been well-received in China; on the country’s closest equivalent to Twitter, the social media site Weibo, one user expressed their amazement “that Mark Zuckerberg’s Chinese skill has improved so much over a year”, while another said they “really appreciate his efforts and ability”.