Facebook will open office in Shanghai in its attempt to return to China

Facebook will open office in Shanghai in its attempt to return to China

Despite being blocked in the Asian country since 2009, the social network opened an office in Beijing in 2014, although it has never clarified its function

   The director of the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Commerce, Shang Yuying, and the representative of Facebook in China, Wang-Li Moser, have addressed the plan of the US company to open an office in the economic capital of the south of the country, according to informed today the financial portal Caixin.

"Both parties maintained an in-depth dialogue on Facebook's plan to open an office in Shanghai and other issues," the commission assured after the meeting held yesterday between the two.

  Despite being blocked in China since 2009, Facebook opened an office in Beijing in 2014, although it has never clarified its role beyond serving as a link for Chinese companies that want to advertise on the platform outside the country.

Although Facebook is not accessible in China, the WhatsApp messaging service, which is its property, is available, although its popularity is much lower than that of the Chinese social network WeChat.

They try to pass censorship

The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has not disguised his interest in having the social network enter China, a country to which he often travels - his wife is of Chinese origin - and in which he even delivered a speech in Mandarin in 2015 in a University of the Chinese capital.

Zuckerberg met in 2014 with the then head of internet censorship, Lu Wei, and a year later with the country's president, Xi Jinping, during the official visit of the Chinese president to Washington.

Last November, The New York Times reported that the social network engineers had developed a tool to adapt it to China's Internet censorship, although Facebook ensured that it had not yet made any decision about its "approach" to the Internet. Asian country.