What are they supposed to do? Either they comply or they leave the Chinese market. It's that simple. I hope people don't fault these companies for playing ball with a communist government.
A lot of companies left the market in South Africa market in the 1980s, to which the parallels are obvious.
But they didn't do it because they suddenly woke up and felt like doing the right thing; they did it because people's outrage over human rights in South Africa began to threaten the profits gained from playing ball there[1].
That's why articles like this one are important.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/11/17/t...
How do you recommend Apple goes about terminating its relationship with China? Do you think it would have comparable costs and disruption to their business that Google's did?
I'm not American so I suspect I don't associate communism with the same things you do.
I'm mainly reading the Wikipedia pages but it seems that communism in theory is actually stateless and doesn't have a government at all, let alone an authoritarian one:
"A communist society is characterized by common ownership of the means of production with free access to the articles of consumption and is classless and stateless, implying the end of the exploitation of labor."
"Marx and Engels maintained that a communist society would have no need for the state as it exists in contemporary capitalist society. The capitalist state mainly exists to enforce hierarchical economic relations, to enforce the exclusive control of property, and to regulate capitalistic economic activities—all of which would be non-applicable to a communist system."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_society
Intent is understood though, thanks.
This is western arrogance at its peak.
Outside of FantasyLand, that will never happen. And Amazon leaving China will have even less impact on China's polity than Google's leaving China did.
Don't get me wrong - unlike Apple who really can't leave China and continue to make smartphones, Amazon could and should leave China. Amazon, like Google, will have to comply and cooperate with Chinese authorities in uncomfortable and unethical ways that I think will make it hard for Amazon to retain their best and brightest employees in the rest of the world. And Amazon will never be allowed to gain marketshare or influence in China at the expense of a local company - the deck will be sufficiently stacked against them until they lose, much like what Google was facing.
"We rollin'"
The US judicial system, prisons and government obviously have many flaws, arguably getting worse, and has a difficult relationship with human rights. However, the US government does not do things like nationally censor particular children's cartoons because they might insult the president (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/17/winnie-the-poo...) or jail human rights activists for 'subversion' (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/25/china-jails-li...).
The US has a human rights problem in some senses; China has an objectively worse one. It's okay to criticise the latter as well.
The Chinese judicial system, prisons and government obviously have many flaws, arguably getting worse, and has a difficult relationship with human rights. However, the Chinese government does not do things like operating Guantanamo Bay or cause civilian deaths using WMD as excuses. How many civilians got killed in Iraq as a direct consequence of US invasion? Their lives worth less than those human right activists?
Censoring winnie the pooh? then tell me how come there are tens of thousands of winnie the pooh related products (toys, books, clothes etc) on Taobao.com?