Censorship Is LinkedIn’s China Friend As It Boasts User Milestone

Shen Boyang, LinkedIn's global vice president and China president, said that the company's number of users in China has surpassed 20 million.

He also announced that the company has officially launched marketing solutions for enterprise users. LinkedIn's marketing solutions will reportedly provide accurate, customized and interactive social media advertising solutions to enterprise marketing staff, aiming to help those enterprises establish global business brands.

LinkedIn entered the Chinese market in January 2014 and it launched its Simplified Chinese beta version and its Chinese name on February 25, 2014. Over the past two years, the company insisted on localized product ideas, and this has meant censoring its content to be in line with what it expects Chinese authorities to validate.

LinkedIn China is a joint venture of LinkedIn, Sequoia Capital, and China Broadband Capital. In June 2015, LinkedIn China published a workplace social application for Chinese young professionals. LinkedIn also started a strategic cooperation with Tencent based on the latter's WeChat and QQ email service. In 2015, LinkedIn further consummated a deal with Sesame Credit, the credit-scoring service of Alibaba's Ant Financial.

So far, LinkedIn China claims to have provided talent solutions to nearly 600 enterprise customers, including Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, ZTE, Lenovo, Fosun, Hainan Airlines, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft.

As an American company, LinkedIn's growth is pretty unique in China for the recent decade of Internet history. The company appears to have had few publicly-known problems with Chinese authorities, and this may be the result of its public admission that it conforms its online content to be in line with Chinese standards. Social media sites like Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and Youtube.com are still filtered and blocked in China. And this past week, Apple's iTunes saw its blockade in China apparently because of content posted on iTunes in Hong Kong.