Facebook Inc., operator of the world’s most-popular social networking site, won’t prevail in China against local Internet companies, Sohu.com Inc. Chairman Charles Zhang said.
The U.S. company’s services will be “copied and learned” by domestic companies, Zhang said at the World Economic Forum’s Summer Davos meeting in Tianjin, China, today. Facebook’s website is currently inaccessible in the country.
"That may be true, but it discounts the global impact of social networks,” Stephen Dolan, commercial director for Asia at Facebook, said in an interview in Hong Kong today. Increased adoption of Facebook in China will enable “social networking with the world,” Dolan said.
Facebook has failed to parlay popularity in other Asian countries such as India and Indonesia to China, where it has been inaccessible since last year. Regulators in the world’s biggest Internet market by users censor content on topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and Tibetan independence that are deemed unacceptable to the ruling Communist Party.
The Palo Alto-based social networking service has about 30 million users in Indonesia, the most of any country outside the U.S., according to Dolan.
