Mark Zuckerberg has mentioned reading Chinese President Xi Jinping's best-selling books on occasion. These volumes, translated into 37 languages and distributed in 170 countries, contain hundreds of pages of speeches by the most powerful man in the world in terms of concentrated political power. Zuckerberg, president of Meta, boasts of speaking Mandarin with some fluency. He has even dared to give a speech in that language during his many trips to China.
Despite his many gestures towards the Asian country, Zuckerberg's plans have continuously crashed against Beijing's wall. The regime does not operate with symbolic gestures or superficial cultural affinities but with a political and regulatory architecture designed to filter, control, and, if necessary, expel. The latest episode confirms this harshly.
This week, Beijing took an unprecedented step by vetoing Meta's acquisition of Manus, the artificial intelligence platform that rivaled the emerging DeepSeek in China. The $2 billion operation, closed in December, has been dismantled by order of the National Development and Reform Commission, which invoked a combination of national security, export controls, and regulations on strategic investments. In essence, China decides who enters, who exits, and what technology can cross its borders.
The case is particularly revealing because it breaks an unwritten rule. Until now, Chinese authorities tended to intervene before operations were finalized. Here, they acted afterwards, after the capital had already been transferred, and over a hundred Manus employees were working under Meta's umbrella in Singapore. The message is clear: no agreement is secure if the ruling Communist Party believes it affects its interests.
Manus is no ordinary company. Founded in 2022 under the umbrella of the Beijing Butterfly Effect Technology, it had positioned itself as one of the emerging players in China's competitive artificial intelligence ecosystem, competing with other major projects. In a context where this sector has become a strategic asset - comparable to energy or defense - allowing a foreign company to absorb that knowledge represents, for Beijing, an unacceptable leakage of technological capital.
The authorities' reaction has been proportional to this concern. Manus' co-founders, Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao, were summoned to Beijing in March and, according to several reports, had their passports confiscated during the investigation. They are not allowed to leave the country. This is a known practice in China when strategic interests are at stake: limiting executives' mobility to ensure cooperation. At the same time, regulators have intensified warnings to the sector, making it clear that no AI company can accept foreign capital without prior supervision.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Manus executives had recently held discussions with Meta about the possibility of resigning as a way to resolve Beijing's investigation into the acquisition. Xiao had proposed to Chinese officials the option of leaving Meta along with other key Manus executives. None of this has worked.
China has been strengthening its technological defenses for years. Legislation allows for the review of any foreign investment that may affect national security, a deliberately ambiguous category that encompasses everything from semiconductors to algorithms. This is coupled with increasingly strict export controls and growing surveillance over talent. Engineers and researchers are considered strategic resources.
Chinese analysts argue that this policy is largely a response to external pressure. The United States has been imposing its own restrictions for years, limiting the export of advanced chips and Chinese companies' access to critical technology. The result is a dynamic of progressive decoupling, where both superpowers seek to reduce their mutual dependence while competing for leadership in AI.
In this scenario, Meta is at a disadvantage. Unlike other multinational companies that have partially adapted to the Chinese environment, Zuckerberg's company has never achieved a stable position. "The Manus transaction fully complied with current legislation," a Meta representative stated.
China does not allow foreign platforms to operate autonomously in sensitive sectors such as social networks or artificial intelligence. It demands local control, access to data, and alignment with political guidelines. For companies like Meta, whose business model is based precisely on global data management, this concession is unfeasible.
For Zuckerberg, the blow is twofold. On one hand, he loses a strategic investment in a key area. On the other, it confirms that his long courtship with China has not yielded tangible results. Neither the speeches in Mandarin, nor Xi's readings, nor the institutional visits have altered a basic reality: the Chinese market does not open out of sympathy but out of political convenience. And right now, that convenience does not exist.