Mark Zuckerberg requested Chinese President Xi Jinping to name his child—here’s how he responded reveals Sarah Wynn-Williams' new book

Meta's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is best known for his incessant drive to control the global market, most notably in China. China's huge potential market presented itself as a prime target for Zuckerberg's ambitions. He did much to attempt to penetrate this extremely profitable market over the years. One interesting feature of this quest was Zuckerberg's dedication to studying Mandarin, the most commonly spoken language in China, which reflected his seriousness about gaining a presence in the nation.

In Sarah Wynn-Williams' recently released memoir, Careless People, she uncovers even more astonishing facts about Zuckerberg's dedication to breaking into China. Wynn-Williams, who used to work as a director of global public policy at Facebook, shares her experience at the company and how far Zuckerberg would go. One of the most shocking revelations is that Zuckerberg, in his effort to establish stronger relationships with China, went so far as to ask Chinese President Xi Jinping to choose a name for his unborn child. This move was rejected politely by Xi Jinping.

As per reports, China is portrayed in Wynn-Williams' book as Zuckerberg's "white whale," a phrase that refers to an elusive dream that obsessed him during his career. Although he tried, Zuckerberg's ambition to dominate China proved elusive, with him having encountered several obstacles, such as China's stringent censorship policies and the nation's love for home-grown social media sites like WeChat and Weibo instead of Facebook.
Wynn-Williams' narrative portrays Zuckerberg's fierce ambition, which she asserts has been an enduring personal and professional fixation. She highlights the way China continued to be an evasive market for Zuckerberg, no matter how hard he tried.

Zuckerberg's push to grow Facebook's influence in China reportedly caused the company to take some morally dubious actions. Wynn-Williams uncovers that Facebook might have sacrificed user privacy in its efforts to penetrate the Chinese market. For instance, she asserts that Facebook promised Chinese officials that it would be supportive of the nation's social order and even gave Chinese engineers confidential details about its facial-recognition technology.
In addition, the company reportedly offered to assist the Chinese government in censoring viral content by supplying a blacklist of banned material. This would have brought Facebook's operations more in line with the Chinese government's strict control of the flow of information.
Along with the contentious business moves, Wynn-Williams also describes a very intimate exchange between Zuckerberg and President Xi Jinping in 2015. Zuckerberg supposedly requested Xi during a meeting to "do him the honour of naming his unborn child." This unexpected request was eventually refused by Xi Jinping. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan were pregnant at the time with their first child, a girl born in December 2015 and named Maxima.
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