The headline "Facebook mulls entering China market" from Sina appears inaccurate. Inaccurate in the sense that Facebook definitely had that in mind and it's no longer news that the social media giant wants a slice of China market. Only that it's currently blocked and relatively unknown to China Internet users.

And who wouldn't, especially if you're Mark Zuckerberg helplessly notice that a Chinese clone trying to model itself from Facebook raises close to half a billion dollars!

Nevertheless the story generated enough buzz even if that Sina article cited unnamed (sometimes synonymous to unverified). Analysts say there are two ways Facebook can enter the vast China market: joint venture (same as what Microsoft is doing) or merger/acquisition (if Facebook can persuade to acquire that alleged copycat).

The news surfaced shortly after Google decided to pull the plug of its Google.cn operations and pull results from Google Hong Kong. Facebook's China domain name existed since 2007, but the network has been blocked for almost a year now and no progress has been made since.

Facebook recently tried to brush off the idea of operating in China. "We are interested in China, just as we are many other countries, and while we are studying and learning about them all, we have no specific plans for China at this time," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. As a social network, Facebook puts it on an even more complicated situation than Google's initial agreement with China to censor its results. The current site is full of content that violate China's censorship laws: groups advocating for Tibet, Falun Gong and so on.

Operating as social network, Facebook needs to prevent China-based users from accessing objectionable information. If I have a friend in China connected on Facebook, she may not be able to access my feeds that may contain "unwanted information". She may not be able to view my photos because it could be a capture of Falun Gong activities done in Hong Kong freely. On the same context, I may not be able to invite her to join a Tibet tourism group as it may be red flagged by authorities. In short, it's just not worth venturing if the whole spirit of social networking is crippled miserably.

As assertive as Google appeared in its decision to remove censored results, China has also showed everyone who is the boss. So unless Facebook is willing to operate under a skewed idea of China social networking model, opening up in China is not worth the trouble.