Emily Rauhala

Facebook has obtained a license to set up an office in China — a first for the social media giant, which has been shut out of China's lucrative market for years despite many attempts to break in. The $30-million subsidiary, which will open in the southern city of Hangzhou, would be set up as a start-up incubator, making minor investments and advising small businesses, according to a person familiar with the company's thinking and a Chinese business filing.

This is part of a series examining the impact of China’s Great Firewall, a mechanism of Internet censorship and surveillance that affects nearly 700 million users.

The truth is that behind the Great Firewall — the system of censorship designed to block content that could challenge the Chinese Communist Party — China’s tech scene is flourishing in a parallel universe. Most of the country’s nearly 700 million users don’t have unfettered access to information — including information about the 1989 killings in Tiananmen Square — and are often stuck with painfully slow Web speeds. They are nonetheless powering a Web boom that last year saw four Chinese firms among the world’s top 10 by market capitalization, according to data website Statista. China is now the world leader in e-commerce. Morgan Stanley projects that by 2018 China will be conducting more online transactions than the rest of the world. Buoyed by that cash, China’s tech start-ups are experimenting with new models that have the potential to make real money — and influence people around the globe.