Chinese Facebook Creaks Open its Doors

A Chinese-language version of Facebook has cropped up, but the company has so far kept mum on its implications for the company.

If you’re operating a Web site and trying to build up a user base as quickly as possible, the World’s most populous country probably isn’t a bad place to start. Facebook took a crack at this strategy on Tuesday with the quiet launch of a Facebook landing page tailored to China: zh-cn.facebook.com.

Although previous international Facebook versions, like those launched in French, German and Spanish, have accompanied some fanfare on Facebook’s behalf, the Chinese version cropped up without an official announcement from the site. (Facebook did announce, though, that it had launched an application to help translate Facebook into 55 new languages, without mention of a new Chinese site.)

The site lags well behind competitor MySpace in targeting China, which launched a Chinese version of its site well over a year ago. Still, Facebook’s “China” network, which gives users of the English site a chance to peg their Chinese nationality, already has more than 282,000 users.