Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alibaba founder Jack Ma in Beijing on Saturday. Photo: Alibaba
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Alibaba founder Jack Ma in Beijing on Saturday. Photo: Alibaba

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg continued his charm offensive in China this week, meeting with the country’s propaganda tsar and going on a controversial jog in the smog as part a long-term effort to improve relations in the country, where the social network is currently blocked.

Zuckerberg, who previously wowed a college crowd in China with his rudimentary Mandarin, also appeared Saturday at a public talk with an icon of China’s tech industry, Alibaba founder Jack Ma — discussing everything from virtual reality and artificial intelligence to problems in China’s economy.

But some of the most interesting parts of their discussion involved the cultural differences between China and the United States, and how those differences are playing out in the tech industry. Here’s a summary from a recap of their talk on Alibaba’s news site, Alizila.

The two executives also bantered about the differences between Chinese and American culture. Ma reckoned that out of 100 Chinese people, probably 80 speak at least some English. Not so in the U.S. He estimated maybe as few as two Americans out of 100 can speak even a few words of Mandarin.

Zuckerberg, who has been studying the language for several years and is married to an American-born Chinese, is one of the exceptions. “There are always discussions about the superiority of West and East, but I saw Mark being very successful in marrying the best of two cultures,” Ma said.

Facebook’s founder added that he was impressed by the high population of engineers in China. “I think China got it right by emphasizing this for a long time,” he said.

This chart illustrates Zuckerberg’s observation, based on National Science Foundation data.

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The chart, based on a 2014 report from the NSF, is from the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB), with the size of each bubble representing the total number of degrees awarded in each country.

“While the United States is only exceeded by China in the absolute number of degrees (1,288,999 in China and 525,374 in the U.S.), the percent of all degrees awarded in science and engineering is quite low in the United States compared with the top-performing countries,” the CIEB explains. “The percent of natural science degrees awarded in the United States is lower than all the countries in this group except for Japan, Poland and Finland.  And the United States has the lowest percentage of engineering degrees of all of these countries.”

Here’s a CCTV news report with more highlights from the talk by Zuckerberg and Ma.

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