China has banned the use of Facebook since 2009, but that fact did not matter at all when Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrived on the campus Beijing’s Tsinghua University to participate in a 30-minute Q&A with students. According to a report from Financial Express, Zuckerberg used the chat as an opportunity to test his newly learned Mandarin Chinese.

Zuckerberg has been pushing for years for his social media network to be legalized in China. However, his interests in the country are not purely business-based. In 2012, the famed tech CEO married Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American.

Two years before that, Zuckerberg made it his mission to learn Mandarin Chinese, partially because Chan’s grandmother does not speak any English. When Zuckerberg and Chan decided to get married, he was able to deliver the message to Chan’s grandmother in Mandarin.

The chat at Tsinghua University was one of the first times that Zuckerberg had spoken the challenging language in public. And while some natives reported that his pronunciation was difficult to understand, the CEO was able to carry on conversation, answer questions, and even show off a little humor during the half-hour session.

Zuckerberg will likely be able to hone his Mandarin significantly in the near future, though. The CEO was recently appointed to the advisory board of Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management. In other words, future visits to Beijing are inevitable for Zuckerberg.

The big question is this: can Zuckerberg’s presence in Beijing change the way that the Chinese government views Facebook? Currently, the government blocks content that is “subversive and obscene,” a category that apparently includes Facebook. Ironically, the country has several social media outlets of its own.