Mark Zuckerberg impressed audiences in Tsinghua University, Beijing, on Wednesday by talking and answering questions in Mandarin, which the entrepreneur has been learning for the past four years, The Guardian reports.

Zuckerberg enjoys immense popularity in China, despite the inability of the country’s internet users to access Facebook. The country is in the middle of an entrepreneurship boom – home-grown internet giants like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu have convinced a generation of young professionals that passion, focus and risk-taking can yield massive rewards.

Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship is relatively new to China, historically speaking, and many Chinese citizens regard Zuckerberg as its paragon.

While Zuckerberg’s Mandarin was far from fluent, his performance during the 30-minute session was coherent and, at times, charmingly idiomatic – at the talk’s start, he called his Mandarin level “really terrible”, to laughter and applause.

The talk was available to mainland viewers on Tsinghua University’s website, and circulated widely on domestic social media sites. Many users praised Zuckerberg’s apparent understanding of Chinese language and culture; others chose not to let his performance distract from the government’s treatment of his site.

He was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2010; his story has already been turned into a Hollywood movie. He was the youngest self-made billionaire to ever appear on the Forbes Billionaires list when he debuted in 2008.

He coded his way into technology lore at a younger age than any of his predecessors: when Bill Gates turned 30, he had yet to launch Microsoft Windows. At that age, Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple, beginning a 10-year exile that concluded with the computer giant’s acquisition of his NeXT Computer, Inc. in 1996. When Larry Page reached the three decade mark, Google hadn’t even gone public.

His social network is used by 1.23 billion people around the world. The company is worth around $135 billion and will probably become the fastest in history to reach $150 billion. Its recent financial results have impressed Wall Street, in part with the success of its shift to mobile phones.

Zuckerberg announced the formation of Fwd.us (pronounced “forward us”) in an op-ed article in The Washington Post late Wednesday. In it, he said the U.S. needs a new approach to these issues if it is to get ahead economically. This, he wrote, includes offering immigrants a path to citizenship.

“We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants,” Zuckerberg wrote. “And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.”

The move comes as a bipartisan Senate group is expected to roll out a comprehensive immigration bill in the coming days. Zuckerberg’s goal echoes the proposed legislation. Zuckerberg, whose great-grandparents were immigrants, said he wants “comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.”

Zuckerberg also calls for higher standards and accountability in schools and increased focus on learning about science, technology, engineering and math. Today’s knowledge and ideas-based economy, the 28-year-old Harvard dropout wrote, is very different from the economy of the 20th century that was based on natural resources, industrial machines and labor.

Fwd.us, he said, was created to “to build the knowledge economy the United States needs to ensure more jobs, innovation and investment.”

Also backing the group are tech leaders such as LinkedIn Corp. CEO Reid Hoffman, venture capitalists John Doerr and Jim Breyer, as well as Ruchi Sanghvi of Dropbox, who was Facebook Inc.’s first female engineer. Joe Green, founder of Causes.com, a social network for community organizing, serves as the group’s president and founder.

Major financial contributors include Google Inc. Chairman Eric Schmidt, Netflix Inc. CEO Reed Hastings, Yahoo Inc. CEO Marissa Mayer, SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, Zynga Inc. CEO Mark Pincus and former Groupon Inc. CEO Andrew Mason.