Chinese President Says 'Cheese' With US Tech Giants

Zuckerberg even put on a suit for the occasion
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 24, 2015 7:50 AM CDT
Chinese President Says 'Cheese' With US Tech Giants
Chinese President Xi Jinping, front row, center, poses for a photo with a group of CEOs and other executives at Microsoft's main campus in Redmond, Wash., yesterday.   (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren, Pool)

One way to get the head of Apple to visit the Microsoft campus: Tell him it's picture day with the president of China. Tim Cook and other technology bigwigs—including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Alibaba's Jack Ma—gathered yesterday in Redmond, Wash., for a meeting with Xi Jinping, who's in the US on his first state visit, reports Quartz. While they were there, Xi and the group of 29 high-level US and Chinese tech execs posed for what the site calls "an awkward class photo of super powerful people" that showed, more or less, what it would look like if "the tech world had an All-Star Game," as GeekWire puts it.

After touring Microsoft's executive building with Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella and watching high-tech demos, Xi smiled for the camera with the others. Zuckerberg (who Quartz points out does, indeed, own a suit) greeted Xi by speaking to him briefly in Mandarin, the South China Morning Post reports. "On a personal note, this was the first time I've ever spoken with a world leader entirely in a foreign language," Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. "I consider that a meaningful personal milestone. It was an honor to meet President Xi and other leaders." One of those leaders was Lu Wei, the Chinese Internet chief responsible for setting up the country's firewall and keeping Zuckerberg's site out—a point not lost on commenters to Zuckerberg's post. "He banned Facebook in China. He doesn't deserve to meet u man," wrote one. (More China stories.)

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