Mark Zuckerberg Makes FB Employees Read Chinese Propaganda

Dec 09, 2014 08:57 AM EST

Several hundreds or even a few thousand copies of Chinese President Xi Jinping's book, "The Governance of China," for all Facebook employees to read is hardly a dent in the coffers of the biggest social media portal if it could add hundreds of millions of Chinese to FB.

This is the motive seen by people who found out in media reports that FB founder Mark Zuckerberg bought the book, considered a "boring propaganda material" for all Facebook employees. He confirmed the purchase and dissemination of the president's book during the visit of Lu Wei, the head of China's State Internet Information Office, to Facebook headquarters in California.

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Lu saw the book at Zuckerberg's desk, not just stacked up, but prominently displayed. He told Lu, quoted by Quartz, "I've also bought copies of this book for my colleagues. I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics."

The book has been published in 10 languages. Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt joins Zuckerberg in commending the book for being "an inspirational piece of work." The book compiles Xi's speeches, talks, interviews, instructions and letters spread in 18 chapters.

Since 2009, Facebook has been blocked in China where there are 640 million internet users. The distribution of the book follows Zuckerberg's display of his Mandarin-speaking skills in October when he attended a university forum in his attempt to convince China to allow FB in the Asian giant again.

Like his Chinese language skills which some described as elementary level, Zuckerberg's book-dissemination scheme was criticized in social and mainstream media.

Hu Jia, a known Chinese dissident, described Zuckerberg as an internet wizard but compares his understanding of Chinese politics to that of a three-year-old toddler, instead of a 30-year-old man.

Even in Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, Zuckerberg was portrayed as a Red soldier from the Mao era, holding a sword on his right hand and clutching Xi's book close to his heart using his left hand.