SHANGHAI  - The sight of a vacationing Mark Zuckerberg in Shanghai has sparked a frenzy of online speculation over the possibility Facebook might return to China, even though the site remains firmly blocked. Excited Chinese bloggers posted photographs of the Facebook founder and his girlfriend at an Apple store and in Shanghai’s art gallery district on Tuesday, expressing hopes it might mean access to the popular social networking site. “Does this mean... Facebook is preparing to be unblocked?” said Kelisisong on the popular Sina microblog service, a Chinese version of Twitter.Facebook has more than 800m users around the world and is the leading social network in all but six countries, notably Russia, where local rivals are preferred, and China, where it has been banned since 2009.
Last month the California-based company said it continued to “evaluate entering China” — the world’s largest Internet market — as it filed paperwork seeking to raise $5 billion on Wall Street.