Meta’s many offerings are banned in China, but China still seems to exercise a great deal of control at the company, even in faraway America.
Jeremy Bernier, a Senior Software Engineer at Meta, has come out with a detailed and explosive account of what he says was systematic exclusion and discrimination against non-Chinese employees at the company — claims that land with particular weight given that Bernier was among the 8,000 employees Meta laid off earlier this week as part of a sweeping AI-driven restructuring.
Bernier’s account paints a picture of entire teams and leadership chains dominated by Chinese employees who, he says, routinely spoke Mandarin at work, excluded non-Chinese colleagues from lunch gatherings and team dinners, and may have engineered layoffs along ethnic lines. “6 out of the 7 layoffs I observed targeted non-Chinese despite non-Chinese being the vast minority,” he wrote. Certain orgs — ads and MRS specifically — he describes as “notorious for being Chinese dominated.”
The exclusion, he says, was rarely subtle. During formal meetings, English was the operating language. But the moment a meeting ended, his teammates would immediately switch to Mandarin — ten or more colleagues having full conversations while the one or two non-Chinese present were left out. At a team dinner at a Korean BBQ restaurant, Bernier says two Tech Leads deliberately sat at the far end of a long table away from non-Chinese colleagues, declined an invitation to join them, and then spoke exclusively in Mandarin the entire evening. “I could not understand how Meta could have ‘Tech Leads’ that so blatantly excluded teammates,” he wrote.
Even lunch, Bernier — who himself is half-Asian — argues, was a battleground. His Chinese colleagues would always get lunch together, never inviting him or the one other non-Chinese member of his team. When the two of them tried to reciprocate by inviting the group, they were refused — only to watch their colleagues disappear together moments later. “It was depressing,” Bernier wrote, “and made me not want to come into the office on those days.”
He is careful to note that the dynamic wasn’t uniformly malicious. “I do genuinely believe that most are good people, and not deliberately trying to exclude others,” he writes. He traces much of the problem to cultural spillover — when 90% of a team and its entire leadership chain share one ethnicity and cultural background, that culture inevitably sets the terms for everyone else. Bernier himself found this out the hard way when his habit of questioning decisions and challenging superiors — standard in American work culture — was met with what he describes as retaliation from his Tech Lead.
The irony of all this would not be lost on anyone watching Mark Zuckerberg’s long and very public courtship of China. Zuckerberg learned Mandarin — spending an hour every morning with a tutor — primarily to communicate with the family of his wife, Priscilla Chan, who is of Chinese descent. In 2014, he gave a 22-minute speech entirely in Mandarin at Tsinghua University in Beijing, stunning the audience. He also wrote a blurb for President Xi Jinping’s book The Governance of China and even asked Xi to name his unborn child.
His courtship of China has been nothing short of extraordinary for the CEO of a company whose products are all banned there. In 2016, he jogged through Tiananmen Square on a day of hazardous smog — air quality index past 300, without a mask — posting cheerfully on Facebook: “It’s great to be back in Beijing!” The image of him grinning past Mao Zedong’s portrait went viral, widely seen as a clumsy bid to endear himself to Chinese authorities. The irony was not lost on observers: he posted it on a platform the Chinese government bans.
Despite all that effort, Facebook never got into China. But if Bernier’s account is accurate, China — or at least its culture and its people — got into Meta.
Bernier’s post makes clear he isn’t calling for anything radical. He wants Meta to enforce English as the working language in the office (something he says some teams already do), hold Tech Leads to higher standards for inclusivity, investigate whether layoffs are disproportionately affecting non-Chinese employees, and ensure more diverse teams. Sensible asks, by any measure.
But he is pessimistic. “I don’t have faith that much would change so long as the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is dominated by the same ethnicity, language, and culture,” he writes. He adds that the situation has likely been festering for at least a decade and appears obvious to anyone who has spent time in Meta’s offices.
Meta has not yet responded publicly to Bernier’s claims.