Amazon gives way to China No negative opinions for Xi Jinping – foreign policy

Bowing down to the Chinese Communist Party: Amazon has removed all notes from dictator Xi Jinping’s (68) books on its Chinese website. Reason: There were also critics who did not always give the Chinese president five stars

Like Reuters reports, Amazon has been offering a collection of Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings in China for two years. These were published by the Information Office of the State Council, a propaganda division of the Communist Party.

Beijing had asked the US online mail order company not to allow reviews or ratings of the policies. The trigger: just one negative review of the book.

According to a person familiar with the process and quoted by Reuters, it was not just this criticism of the Chinese leadership that was a thorn in the side. The problem was all under five stars, the source said.

Apparently, Amazon has bowed to pressure from Beijing: on Amazon’s Chinese site, the book currently has no reviews or ratings from customers: the comments area has been completely disabled.

In Germany too, the Chinese propaganda machine tried to prevent any criticism of Xi Jinping: for example, the readings of the book Xi Jinping the most powerful man in the world by the two authors Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges were canceled at the end of October. . . The readings should have taken place in the Confucius Institutes of German universities.

The reading bans and Amazon’s blazing show Beijing’s influence, according to floodplain expert Frank Mller-Rosentritt (39, FDP): You can see how brutal the pressure from the Chinese Communist Party is and that it does not stop at the national border.

The CCP’s naïve view must finally be a thing of the past, Mller-Rosentritt said. In an open society, we must not only reject such censorship, but actively fight it, for freedom always dies little by little.

An internal Amazon document from 2018 on the company’s activities in China recorded a number of key issues in the country, including: Ideological control and propaganda are the Communist Party’s main tools in cementing its success, according to the document. We don’t judge whether it’s right or wrong.

In order to open up the Chinese market, Amazon has teamed up with the Beijing propaganda department. Chinese books are offered under the name China Books on Amazon for the US market, in return Amazon has been allowed to do business in China. According to Amazon’s internal document, China Books played a crucial role in securing approval from Chinese authorities.

In addition to the apolitical titles, China Books also offers many propaganda works on the ideological line of the Communist Party.

For example, the book Incredible Xinjiang: Stories of Passion and Heritage glorifies life in Xinjian Province and emphasizes that ethnicity is not an issue there. In fact, according to Human Rights Watch, China practices crimes against humanity in Xinjiang: nearly a million Uyghurs are in camps there under the worst circumstances, torture, rape and murder are commonplace.

Other books heroicize China’s fight against Corona, including Tales of Courage and Determination: Wuhan in Coronavirus Lockdown. In fact, the Chinese government initially brutally suppressed information about the corona outbreak in Wuhan and threatened whistleblowers such as Dr Li Wenliang. Blogger Zhang Zhan, 38, who documented the lockdown in Wuhan, was sentenced to four years in prison.

Amazon’s concessions to the Chinese dictatorship contrast starkly with the company’s behavior in two democracies: Amazon ignored local regulations in India and manipulated website search results in favor of its own Amazon products. . In the United States, Amazon has hollowed out consumer protection laws or worked to abolish them.

However, not all companies would give in to pressure from Beijing, according to Reuters: Yahoo has left the Chinese market, Microsoft has announced that it will shut down certain areas of its LinkedIn network in China. The two companies justified this by the difficult business environment and regulatory requirements in China.