I mentioned this in another thread recently but I heard many companies whose CEOs abandoned the Saudi conference still sent representatives in their stead. For PR reasons they distanced themselves but they don’t really want to abandon the Saudis.
Money rules and the CEOs have shareholders to answer to. Making it look good in public is more important than actually taking a stance.
We didn't care that the Saudis were killing dissidents in their own country and slaughtering civilians in Yemen for years. It wasn't until they killed a US resident that anyone gave a single shit, there won't be any objection to China's acts.
Americans won't be outraged because they aren't being told to outraged by the US media. It wasn't even because it was a US resident. It's because he was a fellow "journalist". I say "journalist" in quotes because increasingly more people working as journalists are activists and activists for a cause and intentionally distort and omit biases and don't even attempt to maintain journalistic integrity and ethics. My understanding is that this "journalist" that was killed was practicing more activism than journalism.
He was a journalist, advocating reform does not remove your journalistic integrity. I can't see how pushing for reform in Saudi Arabia would somehow make his death acceptable though.
And Saudi Arabia has killed plenty of journalists in the past. US residency is the unique aspect in his death.
If Nixon shook hands with Mao during the Cultural Revolution, u think Trump would give a hoot about Muslims being detained in Xinjiang?