Duncan Riley over at Techcrunch has pointed to a Times story reporting that Facebook has bid $85 million [USD] for Zanzuo, a very popular Chinese language social network. This would give Facebook, it's first Chinese-language beachhead in the exploding Chinese language beach head.
When I interviewed Chinese blogger-investor-entrepreneur Isaac Mao, for my SAP Global Survey, he told me that Facebook was growing rapidly among English speaking Chinese as was Twitter. That's good. But the language of China is Chinese, not English and the potential of Zanzuo is that it could make Facebook one of China's leading destination sites and probably the most popular site under Western ownership.
The deal is not yet accepted. It will be interesting to see which way this goes.
