LinkedIn’s seven-year effort to operate in China—a country notorious for online censorship—is coming to an end later this year.
On Thursday, the Microsoft-owned site announced it was closing the Chinese version of Linkedin, citing factors including the country’s strict regulations on content moderation. “We’re also facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China,” says LinkedIn’s VP of Engineering, Mohak Shroff.
The site operated as a dedicated place for Chinese users to access LinkedIn’s global platform. But under China’s regulations, LinkedIn must comply with censoring content and terminating user accounts if the government demands it.
This can include blocking Chinese LinkedIn users from accessing profiles and content from other countries. Last month, this led the platform to tell several journalists and academics based in the US, Europe, and Singapore that their LinkedIn profiles could no longer be viewed within China.
The other factor that led to LinkedIn China’s shutdown was the site’s struggles to generate user activity. “While we’ve found success in helping Chinese members find jobs and economic opportunity, we have not found that same level of success in the more social aspects of sharing and staying informed,” Shroff adds.
Still, LinkedIn is one of the rare foreign-owned websites that operates in China, a country that currently blocks access to US sites such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube. The social-networking site expanded in China in 2014 with the goal of helping local Chinese users connect to career opportunities across the globe, and it quickly attracted millions of users.
LinkedIn plans to replace the China site with a new property called InJobs, which will launch later this year. However, it’ll be geared toward helping domestic Chinese users find jobs within the country, not outside the borders.
“InJobs will not include a social feed or the ability to share posts or articles,” the company adds. Once Linkedin China shuts down, Chinese users will probably need to rely on a VPN to gain access to the global LinkedIn site.
