Saving face, via buying Facebook?

Of all the potential peer competitors to the U.S., China seems the most savvy in the information domain.  Rather than confront America's physical military might (still formidable, but bound to decline in the years ahead due to war-weariness and our economic situation), their leaders emphasize a long-term approach worthy of Sun Tzu -- exploiting the West's reliance on information technology (GPS, satellite communications, and so on). 

In that light, this little venture is interesting for a number of reasons...

Beijing approached a fund that buys stock from former Facebook employees to see if it could assemble a stake large enough “to matter.”  ...

The business site says that “sovereign wealth funds are pretty distinct from their governments.”

Perhaps Norway’s fund is, but not China’s. The Communist Party, despite three decades of economic reform, insists on its monopoly of political power. And to maintain that monopoly, it tightly controls its own instrumentalities. That’s especially true at this moment because the Party is in the midst of the most comprehensive crackdown on society since the 1989 Beijing Spring. Chinese leaders clearly view social media as a threat to their rule, especially after seeing its force-multiplying effect in the ongoing Arab Spring protests that have toppled governments.

In short, China’s sovereign wealth fund, which is no more independent of the Communist Party than the Beijing municipal government, wants to buy a stake in the world’s most prominent social networking site because Chinese leaders want to control social media. And they hope to do that as part of their comprehensive campaign to dominate the conversation about China—not just inside the country but around the world as well.


Zuckerberg, in the words of one reporter, “believes that Facebook can be an agent of change in China, as it has been in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia.” After the disastrous China experiences of Yahoo and Google and the troubled history of Microsoft there—not to mention Beijing’s recent tirade against foreign social media—the Facebook founder appears both arrogant and naïve.


Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg is reportedly “wary about the compromises Facebook would have to make to do business there.” If she loses her argument with Zuckerberg and Facebook enters China, the company will eventually be subject to demands to censor its sites, those both inside and outside China. That’s apparently why the Chinese want to own a big stake in Facebook. They are, in short, looking for control in the long run.

Companies keep going to China with hopes of "being instruments of change."  Yet history shows that trying to enter that market results in changing the company, not the country.  Globilization is costing America its soul.  We're already acclimated to buying products produced in China (or elsewhere) under conditions we'd never tolerate at home.  Do we dare allow the demonstrated potential of social media as a check on authoritarianism to be similarly undermined?