And this is it: don't want to upset the promise future sales. And this is how 'dividing and conquering' works. One side speaks with 'one voice', the other with 'thousands of little voices' - and it's game.
Negotiating power is everything, and western democracies and their private and corporate citizens have absolutely none compared to autocratic regimes.
Google has no reason to hold its head high.
Sure, no one is spotless, but as it stands it's Microsoft that runs a censored search engine (Bing in China) and Apple that handed over its Chinese users iCloud encryption keys.
To be fair, you could say Apple and Microsoft had their reasons for doing so (as people including the Chinese themselves have argued). But why all the focus on Google then? Is the idea of a Chinese search engine (which has since been cancelled) worse than actually running a censored search engine such as Bing China?
It's gotten to the point where people commonly think Google is cozier with Chinese authorities than other companies, when if anything it's the opposite. That seems perverse.
But, yes, Microsoft and Apple are equally, if not more, deserving of shame.
Uh, it's even simpler. China is now the only place that a variety of things get manufactured (injection molded plastic in bulk only happens in China, for a significant example. Books in various formats, etc). If you decide to fight China, you can no longer get your X made. For a smallish manufacturing company, that would put you out of business. China sales is just an extra consideration.
The stick/carrot that China uses is market access.
The thing is, there is often no actual carrot. Zuck has been on his knees forever, as have Google, they are nowhere.
If you're Pizza Hut or KFC or some kind of brand, maybe, but anything else ...
This is speculative - as much for anyone doing business with China as for me in the US just thinking. But it's not individual factories doing the hacking and I assume it wouldn't be individual factories doing the reprisals, it would be the Chinese state, which has a reputation for a scorched earth approach.
And yeah, given the carrot often isn't very real, the idea that provokes unanimous behavior among US companies in China seems implausible.
In a lot of ways China is a lot like the US doing the gilded age when companies were at each other throats and no trick was to dirty in the game of markets.
There is this decease in US strategic thinking of looking for an superhuman single conspiracy whenever the cartel of "no longer strong enough" conspirators the author/thinker backs or belong to is not 110% successful where as the reality is often far more chaotic where you have a series of competitors(who is competing with each other and you) essentially changing the market dynamics in a way that makes the market hostile to some organizations.
The other problem is that if capitalism works as described China should be growing and the west declining as capital are supposed to flow towards stable developing(as in still poor) states as that's where the biggest payouts is, the fact that the reverse is true for America(and for the global cold war economy) proves that Smith was either wrong or that America was never a capitalist democracy.
The cold hard truth is that the next wave of growth will likely bypass the west so unless you want to become a low margin(de facto state controlled) monopoly or is small enough to ignore interstate markets you need to be in China, India and in decade or two Africa to grow, and the Koreans and Chinese have already gone there so if you are an western company you are catching up from a position of weakness.
And this question in a sense has little to do with China in particular. When someone is victimized by an individual or institution that has considerable power over them, are they reluctant to come forward? You bet they are. The only thing that can convince them is an individual or institution that can protect them.
The US government cannot protect a US company doing business in China. Is this something like an "abusive relationship", sure but so are a lot of things.
When stocks take a dive and customers flee and the public calls for rolling heads every time there’s a compromise?
How is it ok to lay the blame squarely and fully on the shoulders of the victims here?