Local to what?
They’re just complying with local law…
Amazon quietly removed criticism of President Xi’s books by scrubbing bad reviews, ratings and comments from its Chinese site, it has emerged.
The US retail giant agreed to Beijing’s demand to have anything below a five-star review of Xi Jinping’s book The Governance of China removed from Amazon.cn about two years ago, Reuters reported, citing two unidentified sources.
The US retail giant is just being polite.
An Amazon spokesman said that the company “complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception.”
If there’s a law that all Jews must be reported to the government for deportation and elimination, who is Amazon to argue?
Last year, Zoom shut down a paid US account after it hosted an online forum on Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, citing the need to comply with “local laws.”
About 250 people attended the forum, including some from China who dialled in to listen to speeches by a mother of a slain protester and former student leaders in exile.
Zoom said that it shut down the US account, which was set up by Chinese dissidents, because participants from China had violated “local laws”. It later reactivated the account without providing a reason.
That’s interesting. Zoom is not based in China, unless you consider San Jose part of China. The account was a US one, and some people in China joined the forum. It’s a pretty zig-zaggy road to get from there to “Zoom has to shut down the account because of the law in China.” I suppose that’s why they furtively reactivated it.
If you needed proof that capitalism is fundamentally broken, here it is… the money doesn’t work for Americans, Americans work for the money. Admittedly I’m pretty sure communism and socialism don’t really work either, so dunno what are options are, but capitalism as is currently practiced and exploited by the ever increasingly more authoritarian largest market is shite.
I don’t think China really is all that Communist, anyway. They have a capitalist version of communism that includes heavy doses of authoritarianism and suppression. There is no doubt that the people have better lives than they did, materially, under Mao and the Gang of Four. But the Party is still very much in control.
The Soviet Union, was quite the haven for capitalists, as well, and the party elite became wealthy while producing the propaganda that led the people to believe that they were in the birth pangs of the evolution to New Soviet Man. In Putin’s Russa, people are no more free to dissent than they were under Stalin’s Russia. The big difference is that the current government recognizes how important the Church is in keeping the government in charge.
Well yeah, communism is dead and has been for quite a long time. Just demonstrates that while capitalism and liberalism both came out of the Enlightenment one doesn’t necessarily follow the other.
Down with Capitalism; Roll on the Whig Restoration.