[ad_1]
Didn’t like Chinese President Xi Jinping’s book? Keep your mouth shut.
That’s what China told Amazon, according to a new report, when the country pushed the bookseller to delete all comments and reviews related to “The Governance of China,” a compendium of Xi’s speeches and writings.
Amazon complied. It’s another example of a US company bending to Chinese pressure in order to keep doing business in the huge and growing economy.
The government edict was delivered two years ago, according to the Reuters report citing two people familiar with the matter, but had never before been disclosed.
Now, on Amazon sites accessed within China, there are no reviews or star ratings for the book.
The censorship demand was made after some reviewers gave the leader’s tome less-than-stellar marks, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
It was a negative review that prompted the wholesale ban on reviews and ratings on the book, according to a source. The ban was for the book’s Amazon listing in China.
“I think the issue was anything under five stars,” one of the sources told Reuters.
Amazon agreed to the request as the price of doing business in China, ensuring its ability to thrive in the world’s most populated country, sources said.
Other books on Amazon.cn, however, appear to have reviews and ratings, The Post found. And ratings and reviews are a key part of how Amazon does business — helping to feed algorithms that lead people to other things they might be interested in buying.
Amazon said it “complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception,” the e-commerce giant told Reuters in a statement.
But the Seattle-based company has acknowledged the challenges it faces in China in an internal 2018 briefing document, according to the report.
Among the “core issues” Amazon faces in China: “Ideological control and propaganda is the core of the toolkit for the communist party to achieve and maintain its success,” the document notes. “We are not making judgement on whether it is right or wrong.”
Other companies, including Canada Goose, Nike, Adidas and others have been recently targeted by the Chinese government, which is taking an aggressive stance on companies that speak out about human rights and other issues in China.
Amazon entered China in 2004 in a bid to launch Kindle its e-book reader.
By the end of 2017, China had become Kindle’s largest global market, accounting for 40 percent of its global sales volume, according to the 2018 internal document Reuters reported.
[ad_2]