Article on January 10th, “Business Insider” website in the United States, original title: Zuckerberg imitates the practice of China’s technology industry and tries to defeat Chinese technology companies.
If you bypass the “Great Firewall” of China’s Internet, you will be in a familiar environment. China’s Internet looks similar to and even more developed than the Internet in other parts of the world.
You won’t find tweets, but you will find microblogs, they look similar. Chinese companies borrowed key concepts and ideas from early social media giants in Silicon Valley.
It is not just applications and services that have been counterfeited.
After Western companies subcontracted production lines to China in the 1980s and 1990s, China became a place to buy imitations. Now, in the 1920s, the trend has reversed.
At least in the field of science and technology, we are imitating China.
Today, we see the rise of the first generation of applications developed outside Silicon Valley and truly enter the mainstream. TikTok developed by Chinese enterprises is the best of it.
This shift worries Silicon Valley technology giants – and hawkish politicians who are worried about giving up Internet control to China’s geopolitical influence.
Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, is the representative of it. The minutes of the internal meeting made public in October 2019 showed that he was very aware of the threat posed to his company by rising stars from Asia.
In order to avoid being surpassed, he decided to learn from China’s practice, copying the most popular products produced by competitors and pretending them to be their own products.
Of course, this is nothing new. But Facebook imitates more and more frequently and brazenly.
Earlier this year, Facebook released Reels, which looks like TikTok. This is the second time Facebook has tried to squeeze out TikTok in the past year.
The latter largely rewrites the norms of social media and online short videos.
However, Facebook and Zuckerberg’s approach is hypocritical, especially considering that they advocated against the rise of applications such as TikTok earlier this year. Outgoing US President Trump’s crackdown on TikTok is partly encouraged by people like Zuckerberg.
Speaking at Georgetown University in October 2019, Zuckerberg said that politicians face a choice about “which country’s values will determine which speech can be made in the coming decades”.
The shanzhai, copying, cheap counterfeit thinking, which is considered to be the characteristic of Chinese industry, also stimulated the early development of Chinese social media, but now this thinking has entered the West – and Facebook is the representative.
