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Comment by MangoCoffee | Hacker News Reader

its really sad to see Google kowtow to China. i guess money trump everything.

a free, open and democratic China is Taiwan. you can see it by Taiwan's handling of covid 19. they are open about their cases, allowed press to ask unlimited questions and show everything to Taiwanese and not conceal any info.

its sad that Western companies love money more than the Western values that they always talk about. "Don't be evil"

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Wait, but China is also doing the same. Have you watched any of the press conferences in China? They were frank and forthcoming with information, there were many reddit threads applauding it until everything got politicized around March.

Is this sarcasm?

Uh... western companies do a ton of business with Taiwan. The best semiconductor manufacterer in the world is Taiwanese, for goodness sake.

The problem here is not that Taiwan is being ignored. In fact it's got nothing to do with Taiwan at all.

Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do. The past few decades have seen an aggressive destruction in the power of Western governments to subdue them to Corporate power. The US is a prime example where the Republican party’s only policy platform (not even exaggerating) is “tax cuts are the solution to every problem”.

The US government specifically has been declawed and dismembered by the current administration to the point of uselessness. The only time it’s willing to assert power is to enable the corrupt dealings of political appointees and lobbyists.

>Western companies don’t talk about values, Western governments do.

This is completely wrong.

Every other ad on TV in the US is preaching about how much Walmart/Amazon/Pepsi/etc. care about the environment/LGBT rights/safe working conditions/etc.

Western companies talk about their supposed values _all the time_, they're just mostly full of shit when they do.

I’m talking specifically about values in an international context. Google won’t try to enforce free speech values it loves when operating in China. They will abide with warantless searches there if need be.

The US government though has more power to resist such demands acting as a sovereign equal to the Chinese State.

so what's this "Don't be evil" thingy that Google always talk about

Nice rebuttal, giving a single example to disprove a hypothesis about a complex system with a spectrum of participants. Try to be better at debating hypotheses.

You naively think that western governments are immune from being influenced by China.

You're wrong. Governmental institutions like the WHO have been influenced by China. The German government has been influenced: they have been reluctant to criticize China.

There is no magical governmental institution that is immune from this. If the president was a Democrat we'd be in this same situation.

I never said Western Governments are immune to influence from China. They are not. They do have the power to resist that influence with competent leadership, which in the past two decades has only been provided by Democratic administrations.

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