Facebook To Open Innovation, Startup Hub In China

China’s government has wanted little to do with Facebook over the years but Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has been persistent in gaining ground in the world's most populated country. The tech giant is throwing millions of dollars at a subsidiary in China aimed at fostering innovation, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The latest development was tipped off by an approved filing on the Chinese National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System. This new Facebook offshoot is registered in Hangzhou, the capital of the Zhejiang province. Hangzhou also happens to be where e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group is headquartered.

Facebook’s Hangzhou subsidiary seems somewhat unrelated to the company’s namesake social network, at least according to Facebook’s statement on the matter. It seems more focused on startup culture in the area. Facebook’s Hangzhou operation has registered capital of $30 million, per Reuters.

“We are interested in setting up an innovation hub in Zhejiang to support Chinese developers, innovators and start-ups,” Facebook told Reuters. The company has similar branches in places like Brazil and South Korea.

Most western social networks like Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat are banned in China. Even Google is blocked due to government censorship of foreign news sources. Facebook has been banned in China since 2009.

However, some of those companies have opened operations in China to get some kind of footprint in the country, even if that footprint is not in the shape of their flagship products. Google, for example, has an artificial intelligence research center in China. Facebook on the other hand, launched a Facebook Moments-like app called Colorful Balloons for the Chinese mobile market last year.

In late 2016, Facebook actually agreed to acquiesce to some of China’s news restrictions. The company developed a tool that would block out news stories from showing up in news feeds based on a user’s location, but even at the time, Facebook said it was purely experimental. Almost two years later, the site is still accessible via legal means in the country.