Photos of Zuckerberg in Baidu quickly appeared online, and Baidu's director of international communications Kaiser Kuo confirmed that Zuckerberg was indeed there. "Obviously I'm not going to deny what's in the pictures," Kuo told the Associated Press, adding that Zuckerberg had lunch with Baidu CEO Robin Li.
Of course, such a visit will inevitably spark a whirlwind of rumors, which Kuo jokingly set aside. "Rumors that Baidu is about to acquire Facebook are greatly exaggerated," he tweeted.
Zuckerberg's visit to China and Baidu raise a lot of questions. Besides Russia, China is another huge market Facebook has yet to conquer. Like many other online services, Facebook is blocked in China; does Zuckerberg have a plan to overcome the great firewall of China, and can Baidu help him do that?
So far, the vast Chinese market has proved to be an unsolvable riddle to many western companies, including Google, which is struggling to catch up with Baidu, and which at one point even considered pulling out of China completely in the name of free speech.
If Facebook manages to convince China to open up, it will be a huge win for the service - not only because of China's 1.3 billion potential users, but because other Internet giants failed to do so.