By Chris Chang, posted Feb 9, 2011 at 2:22 PM, 685 views,

Chinese Facebook Users Doubled to 700,000 After Mark Zuckerberg’s China Visit

Facebook is banned in China. But there are some Chinese who found themselves a solution to pass through the great firewall to access Facebook. Or some of them are outside of the country and they could make a Facebook account without the Chinese government’s approval. Anyway,there is a big jump in Chinese Facebook users recently. In the last two months alone, Facebook users in China doubled from about 300,000 to over 700,000. All thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s China visit in December last year!

By now, you have probably seen the news of Mark Zuckerberg spending the first few days of his winter break in China meeting the leaders of China’s top technology companies such as Baidu, Sina and Taobao. Zuckerberg’s schedule has sparked widespread speculation that he has come to China, home to the world’s largest internet population. Even though Facebook is blocked by government censors in China, but lots of Chinese netizens are interested to know what makes Facebook so special to allow Mark Zuckerberg to become the person of the year on the Times magazine. News are all over the Chinese web, newspapers, magazines and even TV news channels! Below is a graph (from Social Bakers), showing the amount of Chinese Facebook users. According to Shanghaiist, although Zuckerberg was in China in the end of December, the growth in users didn’t actually happen until somewhere around the middle of January. And the growth is still continuing, with tens of thousands registering in the last few days alone.

Since we all know accessing Facebook is blocked in China, and if these 700,000 users do live in China – they are actually using VPN or proxies to access Facebook. We think the Chinese government will soon figure out a way to stop these people to communicate with the outside world.

Source: Shanghaiist