For more than a year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a point of stoking fears about China. But now Meta has a growing problem: The social media service wants to transform itself into a powerhouse in hardware, and it makes virtually all of it in China.
Meta’s attacks have enraged Chinese commentators allied with the government’s agenda. Nationalists in China have accused Zuckerberg of cynically using geopolitics to ward off regulatory scrutiny at home, and some Chinese analysts have argued that Meta was resorting to desperate measures because it feared TikTok owner ByteDance’s growing dominance in short video.
Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at Hong Kong-based TF International Securities who speaks regularly to GoerTek, a Chinese supplier to Meta, and other companies, said that Meta’s Chinese partners were watching the situation closely. GoerTek declined to comment. The executives also were interested in finding ways to align themselves more closely with the anti-China wing of the Trump administration, which had launched a trade war with China, imposed tit-for-tat tariffs, and was pursuing its own campaign against TikTok, the people said.
Executives are still hoping the hardware-focused rebranding will shift the conversation away from criticism of its social media business, said two of the people.