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By Noel Young, Correspondent

October 23, 2014 | 3 min read

Facebook’s chief executive Mark Zuckerberg gave a powerful display of his interest in China this week, speaking in Chinese for about a half-hour at a forum at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, and he has long wanted to enter the Chinese market.

He discussed his thoughts on innovation in China, Facebook’s future in the country and why he is studying Chinese.

His Mandarin is far from perfect,said the New York Times, but his first few words were received with cheers and applause by students and faculty members.

“Hello everyone. Thanks for coming,” he told the group. “I’m very glad to be in Beijing. I love this city. My Chinese is really a mess, but I study using Chinese every day.”

There was laughter as he added, “Perhaps I need practice.”

Zuckerberg was speaking at the advisory council of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management. His talk was with students and faculty of the school.

Asked why he studied the language, Zuckerberg said his wife Priscilla Chan’s family speak Chinese. Her grandmother was “very shocked,” he said, when he told her in Chinese that he and Ms. Chan planned to marry.

He said that while he knows more words in Mandarin, his wife also speaks Cantonese and has much better listening comprehension than he does.

“One time I asked her, why is my listening comprehension so bad?” Zuckerberg said. “She said, ‘Your listening comprehension in English is also bad.’”

Zuckerberg’s new association with Tsinghua University shows how Facebook is playing the long game in China, said the NYT.

The hope appears to be that engagement with China, along with Facebook’s current operations selling advertisements to Chinese companies, will help the company some day open a form of its website in China.

“We help Chinese companies increase foreign customers, they use Facebook ads to find more customers,” he explained, citing how Lenovo uses Facebook to advertise in Indonesia.

Facebook had worked with Hangzhou and Qingdao to help those Chinese cities attract visitors via their Facebook pages.

“We want to help other places in the world connect to China,” he said.

On innovation, Zuckerberg said China boasted a number of the world’s most innovative companies. He said he he had dinner with Lei Jun, the founder of the Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi.

“It’s a very innovative company,” Zuckerberg said. “It has a quick development with different products. They’re very cheap,” he said, bringing more laughs from the crowd.

“China is a great country,” he said, adding that studying the language helped him understand the culture. Finally, he said he studied the language because, “I like challenges.”

Later Zuckerberg commented: “Tsinghua is an amazing center of learning and research, and it has been inspiring to be with so many talented future Chinese leaders.”

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