Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg might feel glad he’s home, if indeed he’s been reading what thousands of netizens have been saying about his trip to the East. Zuckerberg was there, mainly it’s reported, as an act of diplomacy and to attend an economic forum. He also visited the Great Wall of China and took a short (controversial) jog through Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Facebook, banned in China since 2009, is of course a potentially massive market for Facebook. While on his trip many Facebook users remarked how strange it was that Zuckerberg was actually updating his Facebook page, but that remains a mystery. This was only the start of the criticism aimed at the Facebook chief.

His “smog jog” through Tiananmen Square didn’t go down too well with many Chinese netizens – later a cause celebre in the international media. Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page March 17^th, “It’s great to be back in Beijing! I kicked off my visit with a run through Tiananmen Square, past the Forbidden City and over to the Temple of Heaven.” Apparently, due to the smog he was running in “hazardous” conditions.

The backlash to this was an avalanche of criticism, including one stark point by a Chinese netizen warning, “Keep running in Beijing like that, your 5-year lung cancer incidence rate may tremendously increase. For more detailed pathologies, please refer your wife. Good Luck!”

It didn’t get much better for Zuckerberg after he met with China’s propaganda chief Liu Yunshan. The tete-a-tete led to derogatory memes surfacing on the internet, as well as floods of abuse being hurled at the social media guru on his own Facebook page.

One such online hit and run was: “Hey Mark, do you know (of course you do!) the place you jogged pass [sic] has [sic] hundreds of people being mowed down by tanks and machine guns 27 years ago? I have heard that on a windy day you can still smell the blood blowing in the wind, did you smell that Mark?”

Another poster called Qingye Jiang pointed out, “Mark, you have a total number of 6 people in the running team. Did you apply for the authorization to run on the street? If not, this is illegal in China. Please respect the local law when you are in a foreign country.”

Photo credit: Facebook