Facebook billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg speaks Chinese with Beijing audience for 30 minutes. Your inspiration?

In case no one else has posted this, and you missed this piece of news today: the Facebook billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, showed off his Chinese skills today, speaking the language for around 30 minutes in a Q&A session with students from Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University. Earlier this week, news reports say he was "appointed to the board of the prestigious Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management".

 

Good enough to be appointed to one of the boards of a leading university of China (the alma mater of the current Chinese President and his immediate predecessor as well), and yet not good enough to avoid having his company's social internet services deliberately blocked in that country, heh heh.

 

You can watch a short version at Youtube here [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_168pH9GJk ], and Youtube has the full version as well. If you're in China where Youtube is another service blocked by the government, you can watch it at at YouKu here [ http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODA5Mzg2ODA0.html ], and the long version can be found at YouKu too.

 

You might know that Zuckerberg's wife is a Chinese American doctor, Priscilla Chan - a fellow Harvard student, born locally in Boston. Some say Chan's restaurant-owning Chinese parents came from Vietnam; other say her parents came from China via Vietnam. At any rate, an article states: "Zuck prepared for that [2012 second trip to China] - and for his eventual marriage to Chan, it seems - by taking Mandarin lessons for a year beforehand. He told ABC’s Roberts that he picked up enough to chat with Chan’s grandmother but is by no means fluent".

 

So, is Zuckerberg's Chinese an inspiration... or not?