As easy as it is to hate Zuckerberg here, it's not all black and white. I think his "it's better to have a restricted conversation than no conversation at all"

As easy as it is to hate Zuckerberg here, it's not all black and white. I think his "it's better to have a restricted conversation than no conversation at all" may have a deeper meaning. I have worked with a Chinese company for a couple of years and been to China too. I'm not claiming to be an expert, but I think he might be on to something here. It seems to me that China is on the verge of a major unrest upon freedom. So far most of the people are quite happy with the fact that their material well-being has literally multiplied in a very short time. That more than covers the limited freedom they currently have. After all, they haven't had a chance to get used to a great degree of freedom at any point in their history sofar. However, increased wealth only carries so far. At some point the newly appointed members of the upper middle class are bound to start wondering, why theír offspring regularly gets bypassed by the offspring of the party officials in entering the top universities. That's going to be a big deal. At that point attempts to suppress free speech will have an inflammatory effect. I believe this will happen in the next ten or twenty years and it cannot be avoided. What happened in Thailand a few years ago will happen in China, scaled up to two levels of magnitude. I don't care much about Facebook or whether Zuck's motives here are entirely self-served or not. I do assume free speech in China will be a hot issue sooner or later and that Facebook may play a big part in connecting their Chinese users to the rest of the world. I wish all the best to China, the Chinese people and my Chinese friends. Such spontaneous friendliness I have not met anywhere else. May your road in joining the domain of freedom be as smooth as possible.